Hitachi Vantara Assigned Two Patents

Deduplication and garbage collection across logical databases
Hitachi Vantara LLC, Santa Clara, CA, has been assigned a patent (10,853,242) developed by Bryant, Alan, East Walpole, MA, Kulma, Marty, Auburn, MA, Wohler, Walter, Leominster, MA, and Cooper, Robert, Somerville, MA, for “deduplication and garbage collection across logical databases.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”In some examples, a plurality of nodes may each host a respective logical database (LDB) that includes database data that references external resources stored in a storage system. Further, each node may maintain, for each external resource referenced by the respective LDB on that node, a reference count of a number of references in the respective LDB to each external resource and a timestamp associated with the reference count. In response to addition of a reference to a particular external resource in a particular LDB, a node that hosts the particular LDB may be programmed to increment the reference count and update the timestamp for the particular external resource. Similarly, in response to removal of the reference to the particular external resource in the particular LDB, the node hosting the particular LDB is programmed to decrement the reference count and update the timestamp for the particular external resource.”

The patent application was filed on March 13, 2015 (15/521,618).

Collision management in namespace of storage
Hitachi Vantara LLC, Santa Clara, CA, has been assigned a patent (10,831,380) developed by Isherwood, Benjamin, Tewksbury, MA, and Kats, Yury, Belmont, MA, for “system and method of collision management in a namespace of a storage system.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”In a namespace distributed across storage devices, collisions of objects stored in the namespace can occur. To manage collisions, first, a collision flag is provided in system metadata of the objects, and second, a predetermined naming convention is applied to the pathnames of collided objects within the namespace. A winner object of a collision is stored with the pathname of the actual object, (e.g., ‘/object’) in the namespace, and the loser object is stored with a pathname derived from the actual object, (e.g., ‘/object.collision’) and the collision flag of the loser object is set to mark the loser object within the namespace. Accordingly, winners and losers of collisions in the namespace can be identified by searching system metadata for collision flags which indicate collision losers, and associated winners can be identified based on the pathname of the losers.”

The patent application was filed on May 28, 2014 (15/103,890).