Violin Assigned Three Patents

Mapping engine for storage device
Violin Memory, Inc., Mountain View, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,402,198) developed by four co-inventors for "mapping engine for a storage device."

The co-inventors are Erik de la Iglesia, Som Sikdar, David Parker, and Dommeti Sivaram, San Jose, CA.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A hardware search structure quickly determines the status of cache lines associated with a large disk array and at the same time reduces the amount of memory space needed for tracking the status. The search structure is configurable in hardware to different cache line sizes and different primary and secondary index sizes. A maintenance feature invalidates state record entries based both on their time stamps and on associated usage statistics."

The patent application was filed on May 28, 2010 (12/790,255).

Alignment adjustment in a tiered storage system
Violin Memory, Inc., Mountain View., CA, has been assigned a patent (8,402,246) developed by Erik de la Iglesia, Sunnyvale, CA, for an "alignment adjustment in a tiered storage system."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A storage proxy monitors storage access operations. Different address alignments are identified between the storage access operations and data blocks in a storage media. A dominant one of the address alignments is identified. Data blocks are mapped into the storage media to remove the dominant address alignment. An array of counters can be used to track the address alignments for different storage access sizes and the address alignment associated with the highest number of storage access operations is used as the dominant address alignment."

The patent application was filed on Aug. 26, 2010 (12/869,604).


System for maintaining coherency
during offline changes to storage media
Violin Memory, Inc., Mountain View, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,417,895) developed by Erik de la Iglesia, Sunnyvale, CA, for a "system for maintaining coherency during offline changes to storage media."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A proxy device monitors memory access operations between clients and a storage media. The proxy device stores at least some of the data from the storage media in a faster tiering media and provides the data from the faster tiering media to the clients for certain associated memory access operations. The proxy is also configured to monitor SCSI communications between the clients and the storage media and invalidate at least some data in the tiering media when particular SCSI messages in the SCSI communications indicate the tiering media contains data that is out of sync with the data in the storage media."

The patent application was filed on June 4, 2010 (12/794,057).