Dropbox Assigned Patent

Dropbox, Inc., San Francisco, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,619,322) developed by Cowling, James, Modzelewski, Kevin P., and Mallipeddi, Venkata Harish, San Francisco, CA, for a “erasure-coding extents in an append-only storage system.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A data storage system stores sets of data blocks in extents located on storage devices. During operation, the system performs an erasure-coding operation by obtaining a set of source extents, wherein each source extent is stored on a different machine in the data storage system. The system also selects a set of destination machines for storing destination extents, wherein each destination extent is stored on a different destination machine. Next, the system performs the erasure-coding operation by retrieving data from the set of source extents, performing the erasure-coding operation on the retrieved data to produce erasure-coded data, and then writing the erasure-coded data to the set of destination extents on the set of destination machines. Finally, after the erasure-coding operation is complete, the system commits results of the erasure-coding operation to enable the set of destination extents to be accessed in place of the set of source extents.“

The patent application was filed on November 13, 2014 (14/540,610).