Hitachi Vantara Assigned Patent

Hitachi Vantara LLC, Santa Clara, CA , has been assigned a patent (10,613,933) developed by Bennett, Jr., Charles C., Carlisle, MA, Clark, Nathan W., Millbury, MA, and Grimaldi, Kevin Canuette, Austin, TX, for “system and method for providing thin-provisioned block storage with multiple data protection classes.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”In some examples, a multi-node system may access physical storage divided into extents and further arranged into extent groups that may be allocated on demand as thin provisioned storage in response to write requests. Protection class instances are set with specified data protection capabilities. Each instance acts as a logical unit having a distinct addressable block storage space from the extent groups allocated thereto. The extents in an extent group to be allocated to a given protection class instance may vary depending on the protection class capabilities. Management information for the extents, extent groups, and protection classes may be stored in mirrored devices separate from the write data stored in the extents for providing redundant protection to the management information and for increasing the availability of write data in the event of a failure that may cause data loss at one or more locations in the system.”

The patent application was filed on December 9, 2014 (15/308,907).