Permabit Assigned Patent

Permabit Technology Corp., Cambridge, MA, has been assigned a patent (8,364,891) developed by Norman H. Margolus, and Jonathan Coburn, Cambridge, MA, for a "storage assignment technique for scalable and fault tolerant storage system."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A method for organizing a storage system that is scalable and fault tolerant, the method including grouping together a number D of storage elements to form the storage system, where D is more than one, constructing a storage assignment table that includes table entries, computing, for each of the storage elements, an available capacity that depends on constraints on the placement of redundant data within the storage system, summing the available capacities to form a total available capacity for the storage system; and assigning the table entries in the storage assignment table to each identify one of the storage elements, wherein the available capacity of each of the storage elements is its effective storage capacity when used as part of the storage system, wherein not all of the D storage elements that form the storage system have the same available capacity, and wherein the fraction of all table entries that identify a one of the storage elements depends upon its fraction of the total available capacity."

The patent application was filed on April 4, 2007.