Dot Hill Secures Six New Patents

Dot Hill Systems Corp. demonstrated its continued focus on technology innovation, with the announcement of six new patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
 
Developed by Dot Hill’s Longmont, Colo. engineering team, these latest innovations are part of the company’s growing patent portfolio. Dot Hill has been awarded 48 patents to date. Dot Hill’s dedication to technology helps give its growing list of OEMs a competitive edge in delivering innovative high performance storage solutions.
 
The newest patents granted to Dot Hill include:

U.S. patent 7,536,495 “Certified memory-to-memory data transfer between active-active RAID controllers” – This patent provides for improved communication efficiency and reliability between redundant RAID controllers. By using a robust, efficient protocol for transferring data and controlling information, this innovation eliminates delays in write-cache synchronization and preserves CPU processing bandwidth for other tasks.

U.S. Patent 7,536,506 “RAID controller using capacitor energy source to flush volatile cache data to non-volatile memory during main power outage” – This invention provides a super capacitor energy source for RAID controllers. The super capacitor stores sufficient energy to guarantee that volatile write-data is safely transferred to non-volatile memory in the event that the main power is lost. Once the data is stored in the non-volatile memory, the RAID controller may remain unpowered indefinitely without losing any data. Super capacitor technology has significant advantages over older battery technologies, such as improved energy density, faster charge time, and significantly longer shelf life.

U.S. Patent 7,536,508 “System and method for sharing SATA drives in an active-active RAID controller system” – This innovation provides a method for efficiently sharing Serial ATA (SATA) drives in an active-active RAID system including one or more Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) expanders and a communications link between the first and second RAID controllers. An ownership protocol between redundant RAID controllers communicates ownership status and changes for each SATA drive in the RAID system. In the event of a failure by a redundant RAID controller, ownership is seamlessly transferred to another RAID controller.

U.S. Patent 7,536,584 “Fault-isolating SAS Expander” – This invention provides an intelligent Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) expander that automatically detects faulty communications on one of its links and isolates the fault by disabling a physical interface within the SAS expander. Upon reporting the disablement, the intelligent SAS expander recovers by taking corrective action and re-enabling the physical interface.

U.S. Patent 7,543,096 “Safe message transfers on PCI-Express link from RAID controller to receiver-programmable window of partner RAID controller CPU memory” – This patent provides for reliable intercommunication between redundant RAID controllers in a high-availability storage system to ensure the correct user-data is written to the disk drives. A RAID controller defines a window in the memory of a redundant RAID controller for writing information, and if any write-addresses are outside the specified window, the receiving controller will not write the data. This can prevent inadvertent data corruption in RAID controller memory by not allowing received data to overwrite unrelated data that needs to be preserved.
 

7,539,799 “Method and apparatus for identifying enclosures and devices” – This invention provides automatic assignment of unique IDs to enclosures that can be used to identify and determine the exact location of the enclosure in the data storage system.

“Our Longmont, Colo., team continues to expand its patent portfolio with technology innovations that we believe translate to a competitive advantage for our OEMs and other customers,” said Jim Kuenzel, senior vice president of Engineering for Dot Hill. “We continue to seek smart solutions to keep pace with the ever-changing landscape of storage challenges faced by OEMs, resellers and IT professionals.”