Pure Storage Assigned Two Patents

Scheduling of reactive I/O ops
Pure Storage, Inc., Mountain View, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,732,426) developed by six co-inventors for a “scheduling of reactive I/O operations in a storage environment.”

The co-inventors are John Colgrove, Los Altos, CA, John Hayes, Mountain View, CA, Bo Hong, Mountain View, CA, Feng Wang, Sunnyvale, CA.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A system and method for effectively scheduling read and write operations among a plurality of solid-state storage devices. A computer system comprises client computers and data storage arrays coupled to one another via a network. A data storage array utilizes solid-state drives and Flash memory cells for data storage. A storage controller within a data storage array comprises an I/O scheduler. The characteristics of corresponding storage devices are used to schedule I/O requests to the storage devices in order to maintain relatively consistent response times at predicted times. Should a device exhibit an unscheduled behavior which may be indicative of the device being in an unknown state, the scheduler may schedule one or more reactive operations on the device configured to cause the device to enter a known state.“

The patent application was filed on Sept. 26, 2012 (13/627,444).

Multi-drive cooperation to generate an encryption key
Pure Storage, Mountain View, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,745,415) developed by Ethan Miller, Santa Cruz, CA, John Colgrove, Los Altos, CA, and John Hayes, Mountain View, CA, for “multi-drive cooperation to generate an encryption key.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A system, method, and computer-readable storage medium for protecting a set of storage devices using a secret sharing scheme. The data of each storage device is encrypted with a key, and the key is encrypted based on a shared secret and a device-specific value. Each storage device stores a share and its encrypted key, and if a number of storage devices above a threshold are available, then the shared secret can be reconstructed from the shares and used to decrypt the encrypted keys. Otherwise, the secret cannot be reconstructed if less than the threshold number of storage devices are accessible, and then data on the storage devices will be unreadable.“

The patent application was filed on Sept. 9, 2010 (12/882864).