Microsoft Assigned Patent

Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA., has been assigned a patent (8,239,648) developed by four co-inventors for a "reclamation of thin provisioned disk storage."

The co-inventors are David A. Goebel, Vashon, WA, James M. Lyon, Redmond, WA, Bulat Shelepov, Bellevue, WA, Robert S. Kleinschmidt and Mark Vayman, Redmond, WA

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A thin provisioned storage system may have a file system manager that presents a logical storage system to a user and a storage management system that manages physical storage devices. When a block of data is freed at the logical layer, the file system manager may identify the freed block and send a command to the physical layer. The physical layer may identify the corresponding physical block or blocks and free those blocks on the physical layer. The storage management system may use a table to manage the location of blocks of data across multiple physical storage devices."

The patent application was filed on April 13, 2009 (12/422,327).