Dot Hill Assigned Patent

Dot Hill Systems Corp., Longmont, CO, has been assigned a patent (8,656,131) developed by Thomas George Wicklund, Longmont, CO, for a “method and apparatus for expanding a virtual storage device.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ” The present invention provides for the expansion of a virtual storage device. Expansion of the virtual storage device includes adding one or more additional storage device units to an existing virtual storage device. Blocks or strips included in an added storage device unit are assigned addresses, to allow the added storage capacity to be accessed immediately. In order to reestablish a pattern of data storage addresses from the original storage device units of the pre-expanded virtual storage device across all of the storage device units of the post-expanded virtual storage device, temporary storage is provided. In particular, as a strip of data is relocated to its proper post-expand location, the data occupying that location is placed in a temporary storage buffer. Data in the temporary storage buffer is then written to the proper post-expand location for that data, with displaced data being written to a second temporary storage buffer.”

The patent application was filed on Feb. 2, 2009 (12/363,870).