EMC Assigned Four Patents

Analysis tool for multi-tier storage environment
EMC Corp.www.emc.com, Hopkinton, MA, has been assigned a patent (8,433,848) developed by four co-inventors for an "analysis tool for a multi-tier storage environment."

The co-inventors are Amnon Naamad, Brookline, MA, Lee Sapiro, Hudson, MA, John Lefferts, Sutton, MA, and Marik Marshak, Newton, MA.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Storage requirements of one or more applications may be serviced by a mix of different disk technologies across one or more storage tiers. According to the system described herein, desirable or optimal mixes of the different disks may be determined and used in the efficient and cost-effective modification or upgrade of storage arrays. For example, whereas SATA drives may be the most cost effective per gigabyte of storage, some applications may not be able to operate based on SATA performance characteristics. On the other hand, flash drives, which may have high performance characteristics, may be too expensive to be used exclusively in a storage array. The system described herein provides a tool that allows for optimal planning of storage resources in a multi-tier storage environment responsive to workload data of a storage array and based on performance characteristics and costs of the storage resources."

The patent application was filed on March 30, 2010 (12/798,097).

Application aware intelligent storage system
EMC Corp., Hopkinton, MA, has been assigned a patent (8,429,307) developed by Sorin Faibish, Newton, MA, Philippe Armangau, Acton, MA, and Christopher Seibel, Walpole, MA, for an "application aware intelligent storage system."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "This invention is a system and a method for operating a storage server that provides read or write access to a data in a data network using a new architecture. The method of processing I/Os in response to a request by a client of the storage server executes one or more services communicated by a policy engine. The I/Os received from the application are tagged and catalogued to create co-related I/O patterns. The policy engine is then updated with the results of processing the I/Os after executing services on those I/Os."

The patent application was filed on June 30, 2010 (12/826,749).

Automated application-based storage provisioning
EMC Corp., Hopkinton, MA, has been assigned a patent (8,438,342) developed by Stephen Todd, Shrewsbury, MA, and Paul J. Caruso, Danville, N.H., for an "automated application-based storage provisioning."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Described are techniques for automatically provisioning storage for an application. A request to provision object-based storage for the application in a storage system is received The request identifies the application and is received from a user interface interacting with the storage system at a specified one of a plurality of user levels, each of said plurality of user levels being associated with a different level of abstraction with respect to first processing performed in implementing the request. The first processing is performed to provision object-based storage for the request. The first processing is determined in accordance with the application and includes a level of automation varying in accordance with the specified user level at which the user interface interacts with the storage system. The automation includes selecting one or more default options in accordance with best practices of the application."

The patent application was filed on Dec. 9, 2009 (12/653,162).

Storage system having associated
situational analysis framework
for automatic response to movement in state space
EMC Corp., Hopkinton, MA, has been assigned a patent (8,443,157) developed by David Stephen Reiner, Lexington, MA, for a "storage system having associated situational analysis framework for automatic response to movement in a state space."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "The operation of a storage system is controlled by determining dimensions of a situational state space characterizing operating conditions of the storage system, associating policy sets with respective states of the state space, monitoring system operation in the state space, selecting a particular one of the policy sets based on an identified current state in the state space, and controlling the operation of the system in accordance with the selected policy set. These operations are performed by a processing device incorporated in or otherwise associated with the system, with the processing device implementing a situational analysis framework comprising a learning module coupled to a production module. The situational analysis framework may be part of a policy engine. The dimensions of the situational state space in an illustrative embodiment may comprise two or more dimensions selected from one or more dimension categories such as load, performance, time and event state."

The patent application was filed on Dec. 16, 2009 (12/639,668).