Rackspace Assigned Patent

Rackspace US, Inc., San Antonio, TX, has been assigned a patent (8,990,257) developed by Barton, Michael, Reese, Will, San Antonio, TX, Dickinson, John A., Schertz, TX, Payne, Jay B., Thier, Charles B., San Antonio, TX, and Holt, Gregory, Hollywood Park, for a “method for handling large object files in an object storage system.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”Several different embodiments of a segmented object storage system are described. The object storage system divides files into a number of object segments, each segment corresponding to a portion of the object, and stores each segment individually in the cloud storage system. The system also generates and stores a manifest file describing the relationship of the various segments to the original data file. Requests to retrieve the segmented file are fulfilled by consulting the manifest file and using the information from the manifest to reconstitute the original data file from the constituent segments. Modifying, appending to, or truncating the object is accomplished by manipulating individual segments and the manifest file. In further embodiments, manipulation of the individual object segments and/or the manifest is used to implement copy-on-write, snapshotting, software transactional memory, and peer-to-peer transmission of the large file.“

The patent application was filed on December 23, 2011 (13/336,175).