American Megatrends Assigned Two Patents

Bi-directional communication between redundant storage controllers
American Megatrends, Inc., Norcross, GA, has been assigned a patent (8,650,328) developed by four co-inventors for a “bi-directional communication between redundant storage controllers.”

The co-inventors are Paresh Chatterjee, Fremont, CA, Vijayarankan Muthirisavengopal, Newark, CA, Naraynan Balakrishnan, Chennai, India, and Jomy Maliakal, Newark, CA.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “Technologies are described herein for providing bi-directional communication between redundant storage controllers in a storage system. One of the storage controllers operates in the initiator role over a point-to-point communication channel connecting the controllers, while the other operates in the target role. To transmit a function call from a storage module executing on the initiator storage controller to a corresponding module executing on the target storage controller, the initiator storage controller issues a write command to the second storage controller over the point-to-point communication channel. In order to transmit a function call from a storage module executing on the target storage controller to a corresponding module executing on the initiator storage controller, the target storage controller responds to a pending anticipatory read command sent from the initiator storage controller over the point-to-point communication channel.”

The patent application was filed on Nov. 5, 2009 (12/612,736).

Providing redundancy in a storage system
American Megatrends, Inc., Norcross, GA, has been assigned a patent (8,639,878) developed by four co-inventors for “providing redundancy in a storage system.”

The co-inventors are Paresh Chatterjee, Ajit Narayanan, Fremont, CA, Narayanan Balakrishnan, Milpitas, CA, and Vijayarankan Muthirisavenugopal, Chennai, India.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A system, method, apparatus, and computer-readable medium are described for providing redundancy in a storage system. According to one method, maps are generated and stored that define stripe patterns for storing data on the storage nodes of a storage cluster. The maps are defined such that when a new storage node is added to the cluster, no movement of data occurs between two storage nodes that existed in the cluster prior to the addition of the new storage node during re-striping, and such that the data stored on each storage node is mirrored on another storage node. Storage nodes may also be designated as an owner or a peer for each storage zone. Input/output operations received at an owner node are fielded directly and mirrored to the peer node, while input/output operations received at a peer node are redirected to the owner node for processing.”

The patent application was filed on Aug. 5, 2011 (13/204,070).