Google Assigned Patent

Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,874,523) developed by four co-inventors for a “method and system for providing efficient access to a tape storage system.”

The co-inventors are Rebekah C. Vickrey, Frank C. Dachille, Mountain View, CA, Stefan V. Gheorghita, Zurich, Switzerland, and Yonatan Zunger, Mountain View, CA.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A method for asynchronously replicating data onto a tape medium is implemented at one or more server computers associated with a distributed storage system and connected to a tape storage system. Upon receiving a first request from a client for storing an object within the tape storage system, a server computer stores the object within a staging sub-system of the distributed storage system and provides a first response to the requesting client. If a predefined condition is met, the server computer transfers objects from the staging sub-system to the tape storage system. For each transferred object, the server computer adds a reference to the object to a tape management sub-system, identifies a corresponding parent object associated with the object and its metadata within a parent object management sub-system of the distributed storage system, and updates the parent object’s metadata to include the object’s location within the tape storage system.”

The patent application was filed on Feb. 8, 2011 (13/023,498).