VMware Assigned Patent

VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,499,004) developed by Satyam B. Vaghani, and Murali Vilayannur, San Jose, CA, for a “file system with optimistic I/O operations on shared storage.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A method for performing I/O operations on a file stored in a file system utilizing a shared storage system and accessible by a plurality of host computers is disclosed. A host computer receives from a process executing on it, a request to read data stored in the file. The host computer then requests the data stored in the file without acquiring a lock from the file system. The host computer also maintains a timeout value associated with the file while reading the data. The host computer receives at least a portion of the data prior to an expiration of time, and if all the data has not been received before the expiration of time, it then assesses whether another of the host computers has acquired a lock on the file, and, if so, invalidates the received data without providing it to the requesting process.”

The patent application was filed on Aug. 16, 2012 (13/587,713).