Two New Patents for Dot Hill

Dot Hill Systems Corp.  has been granted two new patents by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, bringing the company’s portfolio to a total of 53 patents.
 
Developed by Dot Hill’s Longmont, Colo., engineering team, these latest innovations are intended to give Dot Hill’s OEMs, system integrators and resellers a competitive edge in providing innovative, high performance storage solutions to the marketplace.
 
The newest patents granted to Dot Hill include:

• U.S. Patent 7,558,897 Method for adopting an orphan I/O port in a redundant storage controller – This patent provides a method for a redundant storage controller to take control of the I/O ports of another storage controller, if a failure is detected. The I/O ports are shared between both storage controllers in a modular storage controller architecture that allows the storage controllers to be independently organized as field replaceable units (FRUs), and the shared I/O ports are a separate FRU from the storage controller FRUs. The orphan I/O port invention provides an economical solution to storage controller failure in a modular architecture, where I/O ports are shared between the two storage controllers. Availability is maintained by allowing a failed storage controller to failover to a surviving storage controller, so that the surviving storage controller can acquire the failed controller’s I/O ports.
• U.S. Patent 7,558,981 Method and apparatus for mirroring customer data and metadata in paired controllers – This invention improves write-performance for active-active storage controllers in a redundant controller configuration, by making the mirroring of write-data between redundant controllers more efficient. A portion of customer data is mirrored from a primary controller to a secondary controller in a single message or frame. This is accomplished without requiring a separate message and corresponding interrupt in order to provide the second controller with metadata for the segment of customer data.

“Dot Hill continues to rack up patents that uniquely solve storage challenges and improve the customer’s experience,” said Jim Kuenzel, senior vice president of Engineering for Dot Hill. “Our patent portfolio is a differentiator that helps allow us to deliver one-of-a-kind technology that makes life easier for all of our go-to-market partners and the businesses they serve.”