ProphetStor Assigned Patent

ProphetStor Data Services, Inc. was awarded a patent, US 9,817,584 B2, by the United State Patent and Trademark Office, relates to storage system having a node with light weight container in Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) solutions.

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Container technology are changing the dynamics for data centers. As data center can easily have tens of thousands to millions of containers, it is impossible for IT administrators to handle the resource configuration, health status and meet SLAs at the same time.

This patent describes the automation mechanism of container operation by AI, and also includes a clear and holistic design for an AI-driven container intelligence. It puts the different roles of containers into consideration. It illustrates the automation of three types of containers that are commonly seen in a data center. They are storage containers to operate the storage device, data containers for running databases, and application containers for providing the specific service.

“Integration of this patent with other ProphetStor’s patents helps to deliver a cutting-edge AI-driven solution for a self-driving data centers. With the container intelligence, it can automatically manage the operation of containers without human intervention. It will decide when to add more containers to hosts or remove containers from the hosts based on the prediction that’s available from computing resources, detected anomaly of hardware and software, and the location of data services,” said Eric Chen, CEO, ProphetStor. “Innovation has been one of the cornerstones of ProphetStor’s success as a pioneer and leader of the SDS technology with significant enhancements to meet the requirement in SDDC.“

Key features and benefits of self-driving container management:

• Automatic container operation on a multi-node system based on the performance prediction, anomaly status of each node, and data services allocation. With the help of this automation, a data center can operate more and more containerized workload without adding the work of IT admins.

• By combing this patent with one of the company’s patented technology, i.e., performance prediction, the containers are automatically deployed on the nodes or removed from the nodes based on the performance prediction. For example, if a node is predicted to have higher performance loading in the next 24 hours, it should not have more loading or even remove current loading in case of computation resource insufficiency.

• By combining this patent with one of the firm’s patented technology, i.e., disk failure prediction, the containers are automatically removed from those nodes have soon-to-fail disks. This automation avoids node crash due to disk failure.