Quest Software/Dell Assigned Four Patents

Object deduplication and application aware snapshots
Quest Software Inc., Aliso Viejo, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,613,043) developed by Rao, Goutham, Los Altos, CA, Brueggemann, Eric, Cupertino, CA, and George, Carter, Portland, OR, for a “object deduplication and application aware snapshots.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “Embodiments deploy delayering techniques, and the relationships between successive versions of a rich-media file become apparent. With this, modified rich-media files suddenly present far smaller storage overhead as compared to traditional application-unaware snapshot and versioning implementations. Optimized file data is stored in suitcases. As a file is versioned, each new version of the file is placed in the same suitcase as the previous version, allowing embodiments to employ correlation techniques to enhance optimization savings.“

The patent application was filed on January 15, 2016 (14/996,608).

Intelligent deduplication data prefetching
Quest Software Inc., Aliso Viejo, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,600,490) developed by Jayaraman, Vinod, San Francisco, CA, and Bolla, Ratna Manoj, Hyderabad, India, for a “intelligent deduplication data prefetching.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “Deduplication dictionaries are used to maintain data chunk identifier and location pairings in a deduplication system. When access to a particular data chunk is requested, a deduplication dictionary is accessed to determine the location of the data chunk and a datastore is accessed to retrieve the data chunk. However, deduplication dictionaries are large and typically maintained on disk, so dictionary access is expensive. Techniques and mechanisms of the present invention allow prefetches or read aheads of datastore, (DS) headers. For example, if a dictionary hit results in datastore DS(X), then headers for DS(X+1), DS(X+2), DS(X+read-ahead-window) are prefetched ahead of time. These datastore headers are cached in memory, and indexed by datastore identifier. Before going to the dictionary, a lookup is first performed in the cached headers to reduce deduplication data access request latency.“

The patent application was filed on June 23, 2014 (14/311,485).

Heat indices for file systems and block storage
Quest Software Inc., Aliso Viejo, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,600,488) developed by Dinkar, Abhijit, San Jose, CA, Jayaraman, Vinod, San Francisco, CA, Bashyam, Murali, Fremont, CA, and Rao, Goutham, Los Altos, CA, for a “heat indices for file systems and block storage.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “Techniques and mechanisms are provided to allow for selective optimization, including deduplication and/or compression, of portions of files and data blocks. Data access is monitored to generate a heat index for identifying sections of files and volumes that are frequently and infrequently accessed. These frequently used portions may be left non-optimized to reduce or eliminate optimization I/O overhead. Infrequently accessed portions can be more aggressively optimized.“

The patent application was filed on March 11, 2016 (15/067,976).

Handling restores in incremental backup storage system
Quest Software Inc., Aliso Viejo, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,594,643) developed by Dinkar, Abhijit, San Jose, CA, Rao, Goutham, Los Altos, CA, Jayaraman, Vinod, San Francisco, CA, and Pardeshi, Shekhar, Fremont, CA, for a “handling restores in an incremental backup storage system.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “Techniques and mechanisms are provided for storing data in a backup storage system. According to various embodiments, a first blockmap in a backup storage system may be identified. The first blockmap may correspond with a first restore point. The first blockmap may identify a first plurality of data segments. Each of the first plurality of data segments may have associated therewith a respective storage location in the backup storage system. The first blockmap may be compared with a designated storage system state to identify a subset of the first plurality of data segments that each correspond with a respective matching data segment in the designated storage system state. A second blockmap may be stored in the backup storage system. The second blockmap may correspond with a second restore point. The second blockmap may include the identified subset of the first plurality of data segment.“

The patent application was filed on March 6, 2013 (13/786,781).