Symantec Assigned Three Patents

Detecting intermittent path to storage system
Symantec Corp., Mountain View, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,711,684) developed by Ameya Prakash Usgaonkar, Hari Krishna Vemuri and Siddhartha Nandi, Pune, India, for a “method and apparatus for detecting an intermittent path to a storage system.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A method and apparatus for detecting an intermittent path to a storage system comprising accessing path statistics comprising indicia of path state of a path to a storage system, determining whether the path state has changed during a predefined period and, if the path state has changed at least a predefined number of times during the predefined period, identifying the path as intermittent. Once a path is deemed intermittent, the path is aged until either the path is no longer intermittent or the path is deemed dead.”

The patent application was filed on July 9, 2007 (11/827,044).

Direct connections to plurality of storage object replicas in network
Symantec Operating Corp., Mountain View, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,694,649) developed by Thomas E. Saulpaugh, San Jose, CA, Gregory L. Slaughter, Palo Alto, CA, and Ruchir Tewari, Sunnyvale, CA, for a “direct connections to a plurality of storage object replicas in a computer network.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A system and method for efficiently accessing replicas of a storage object. A first node may perform a find operation to determine a plurality of nodes that each store a replica of a first storage object. For each node in the plurality of nodes, the first node may establish a direct connection to the node. The first node may then access the replicas of the first storage object using the respective direct connections to the plurality of nodes. In one embodiment, the nodes may be nodes in a peer-to-peer network. Establishing a direct connection to each storage object replica may enable the first node to communicate with each node in a single hop without having to pass messages via intermediate nodes in the peer-to-peer network.”

The patent application was filed on Nov. 14, 2011 (13/295,688).

Storage replication
Symantec, Mountain View, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,700,726) developed by Tariq Saeed, Sunnyvale, CA, for “storage replication systems and methods.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “Systems and methods for information storage replication are presented. In one embodiment a storage flow control method includes estimating in a primary data server what an outstanding request backlog trend is for a remote secondary data server; determining a relationship of an outstanding request backlog trend to a threshold; and notifying a client that the primary data server can not service additional requests if the trend exceeds the threshold. In one embodiment the estimating comprises: sampling a number of outstanding messages at a plurality of fixed time intervals; and determining if there is a trend in the number of outstanding messages over the plurality of fixed time intervals. It is appreciated the estimating can be performed in a variety of ways, (e.g., utilizing an average, a moving average, etc). Determining the trend can include determining if values monotonically increase. The estimating in the primary server can be performed without intruding on operations of the remote secondary data server. The primary data server and the secondary data server can have a variety of configurations (e.g., a mirrored configuration, a RAID-5 configuration, etc.).“

The patent application was filed on Dec. 15, 2009 (12/638,868).