Hitachi Assigned Two Patents

Managing virtual ports and logical units
on storage systems

Hitachi Corp., Tokyo, has been assigned a patent (8,364,869) developed by Hiroshi Arakawa, and Toshio Otani, Sunnyvale, CA, for "methods and apparatus for managing virtual ports and logical units on storage systems."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A storage system configured to associate a virtual port 810 to a plurality of physical ports 800. In response to commands from computers, the storage system 100 manages relation between physical ports and virtual ports and relation between virtual port and volumes by performing processes such as creating a virtual port, assigning LUs to a virtual port, moving a virtual port between physical ports and deleting a virtual port. The storage system also maintains/calculates statistics information for ports and displays the information for each virtual port."

The patent application was filed on Aug. 21, 2012 (13/590,521).

Deploying virtual HDD to storage system

Hitachi Corp., Tokyo, has been assigned a patent (8,397,046) developed by Yutaka Kudo, San Jose, CA, for a "method and apparatus for deploying virtual HDD to storage system."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Exemplary embodiments of the invention provide a solution to deploy a virtual HDD (VHD) to virtual device with maximizing capacity efficiency and data access performance by making the allocation unit size of virtual device the same as that of the VHD. In one embodiment, a method of deploying a VHD file to a storage apparatus comprises checking a block size of the VHD file received by the storage apparatus based on a header of the VHD file; creating a virtual volume to provide a page size which is same size as the block size of the VHD file; and performing one of (A) copying contents of the VHD file to the created virtual volume by allocating one page of the created virtual volume for each block of the VHD file; or (B) formatting the created virtual volume with a virtual volume file system, and copying the VHD file to the formatted virtual volume."

The patent application was filed on March 26, 2009 (12/411,805).