Two More Patents for Ibrix

IBRIX, Inc. was granted two more patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for technology advancing distributed file systems. The innovations covered by the newly granted patents enhance the company’s award-winning product, IBRIX Fusion, with data allocation and directory capabilities in enterprise storage environments.

Distributing Files Across Multiple, Permissibly Heterogeneous, Storage Devices
The first of the new patents, Shadow Directory Structure in a Distributed Segmented File System (No. 7,430,570), can be deployed in high performing computing environments to achieve parallel data consistency checking. The directory can also reconstruct lost data in the event of a system failure. If a system hardware component is not working properly or a service interruption occurs, the shadow directory ensures usability and continuity as the data remains in a consistent state and users maintain the ability to access files. The second patent, Storage Allocation in a Distributed Segmented File System (No. 7,406,484), addresses how data is distributed across the file system and greatly improves scalability throughout clustered enterprise data storage environments.

Together the new patents improve the system administration capabilities of IBRIX Fusion, a software-only file system based on a segmented parallel structure. The patent on which IBRIX Fusion is based, Distributing Files Across Multiple, Permissibly Heterogeneous, Storage Devices (No. 6,782,389), was awarded to IBRIX in 2004 and revolutionized scalable computing for both performance and large-scale file storage environments. The new patents enhance IBRIX’s IP portfolio by offering benefits inherent in a non-hierarchical approach. Unlike alternative hierarchical-based solutions which are prone to hot spots, limit scalability, and require more data hops to get to files, IBRIX Fusion has no central metadata component or distributed lock manager so all data and metadata is processed in parallel. Additionally, IBRIX software works equally well in all storage topologies including Network Attached Storage, Direct Attached Storage, Storage Area Networks, and cluster and grid computing.

“Previously the Achilles’ heel of file systems was the tendency for small errors in one area of the enterprise to shut down the system,” said Dr. Steven Orszag, IBRIX Founder and Percy F. Smith Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, Yale University. “The new shadow directory structure eliminates this issue while the allocation process improves the overall scalability of the system. We applied the storage allocation patent to real-world applications and offered FileMigrator, an advanced feature of our software, to IBRIX’s growing base of leading-brand customers earlier this year.”

Today, IBRIX Fusion software supports enterprise customers that span the media and entertainment, financial services, internet, life sciences, and oil and gas markets. Its unique non-hierarchical approach enables tremendous flexibility in scaling storage capacity and performance independently. As a result, businesses deploying IBRIX Fusion are scaling to petabyte levels to accommodate growing data repositories and improving I/O performance by 10-to-50 times.

“Our software produces real business benefits for our customers—finance companies with large data repositories are assessing lending risks more efficiently and animation studios can render films faster,” said Milan Shetti, President and CEO, IBRIX. “These two additional patents contribute to our overall industry leadership and mark our continued commitment to delivering technology breakthroughs that uniquely address changing enterprise storage challenges.”