Violin Memory Assigned Patent

Violin Memory, Inc., Santa Clara, CA , has been assigned a patent (9,141,302) developed by Bennett, Jon C. R., Sudbury, MA, for a “snapshots in a flash memory storage system.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A system and method of managing the storage of data in flash memory performs snapshots of the data by maintaining the data at the epoch that the snapshot is performed in the same physical memory location. Data that is modified after the snapshot is then stored to a new physical memory location and referenced to the snapshot location. When a user read operation is performed, the data is read from the original location if the read operation is for the snapshot data. The read operation for dynamic data is performed from the original location if the data has not change since the snapshot epoch, or from the referenced data location if the data has changed since the snapshot epoch. Snapshots are released by dereferencing the original location if the data has been changed since the snapshot epoch.“

The patent application was filed on April 18, 2013 (13/865,666).