Dot Hill Adds Two Patents on Storage Controllers

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced the addition of two new patents to the company’s technology portfolio, bringing the company’s portfolio to a total of 67 patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The first of the two most recently granted patents improves reliability and usability for storage controllers and data storage systems. Storage controllers contain the control logic that performs commands for overall management of device operations.

U.S. patent 7,743,224 Method and apparatus for virtual load regions in storage system controllers provides a novel method for managing storage controller code, where two different versions of code are stored in storage controller memory. The code identifiers designate which of the two code versions is to be a primary version, which the storage controller will initially attempt to boot.

If any problems are encountered in booting or operating with the primary version of code, the controller first stops execution of the failing code, second, switches to the other version of storage controller code, and third, initiates a boot sequence from the other version of code. This invention is helpful for allowing a controller to successfully boot if a version of code is either corrupted or has other problems. Therefore, a test or experimental version of code can be loaded into a storage controller. If the test or experimental version of code cannot boot, the controller will automatically select an older stable version of code and successfully boot.

The second patent granted covers technology that helps improve the overall management experience for storage administrators, by reducing repetitive extraneous information relayed by storage system controllers, improving available network bandwidth and reducing clutter at the user interface.

U.S. patent 7,743,138 Method and apparatus for external event notification management over in-band and out-of-band networks in storage system controllers provides a method for notifying a user of events involving the data storage system. Storage controllers in the data storage system maintain subscription statistics for each user of the data storage system, where the subscription statistics describe which informational, error, and other events the user wishes to be notified of. The data storage system also keeps track of which events have already been reported to a requesting user, so that the same events are not reported to the same user multiple times.

"To meet the needs of today’s ‘always on’ business world, data storage has changed radically; technology innovation is essential to driving greater levels of functionality, ease of use, capacity and throughput," said Jim Kuenzel, senior vice president of engineering at Dot Hill Systems. "These new patents are further testament to Dot Hill’s technology innovation and to the depth and breadth of our technical talent, which is unmatched across the storage industry."