VMware Assigned Patent

VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,745,336) developed by Satyam B. Vaghani, Palo Alto, CA, for “offloading storage operations to storage hardware.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “In a computer system with a disk array that has physical storage devices arranged as logical storage units and is capable of carrying out hardware storage operations on a per logical storage unit basis, the hardware storage operations can be carried out on a per-file basis using various primitives. These primitives include instructions for zeroing file blocks, cloning file blocks, and deleting file blocks, and these instructions operate on one or more files defined in a blocklist, that identifies the locations in the logical storage units to which the files map.”

The patent application was filed on May 29, 2008 (12/129,323).