Robin Granted 12 Patents in 4Q20 for Storage, Networking, Orchestration and Automation of Applications on Kubernetes

Robin Systems, Inc. received 12 patents from the U.S Patent and Trademark Office during the 4Q20, boosting the company’s IP portfolio in 3 technologies central to the management and orchestration of 5G and enterprise cloud-native applications with Kubernetes.

These patents bring the company’s IP portfolio to a total of more than 65 across its product portfolio, which include Cloud Native Platform (CNP), Cloud Native Storage (CNS), Multi-Datacenter Automation Platform (MDCAP).

“Our engineering team has continued driving the pace of innovation at Robin.io, delivering meaningful advancements in distributed compute and storage systems, as well as technologies to simplify the management of network- and storage-intensive applications for 5G and enterprise use cases on Kubernetes,” said Partha Seetala, founder and CEO. “As we head into 2021, the Robin.io IP portfolio has grown substantially, with each patent playing an important role in how we deliver solutions for our enterprise and 5G telco customers.”

The company provides cloud-native capabilities that help with automating deployment, scaling and lifecycle management of complex stateful applications on Kubernetes. The firm has been supporting deployment of its products on AWS Cloud since the initial release of its cloud-native solutions and has multiple enterprise customers using CNP and CNS on the AWS Cloud.

Along with the 3 patents issued earlier in 2020, the additional 12 advance the company’s capabilities in distributed network, compute and storage systems, as well as container management and deployment of bundled applications.

Enhance Kubernetes to host and manage distributed stateful applications
The company has been issued 4 patents to facilitate key processes in distributed computing systems, including implementing containers for stateful applications, accessing log files and monitoring containers.

Patents in this group include:

• Dynamic adjustment of application resources in a distributed computing system

• Monitoring containers in a distributed computing system

• Implementing containers for a stateful application in a distributed computing system

• Accessing log files of a distributed computing system using a simulated file system

Improve capabilities of distributed cloud-native storage stack for Kubernetes
Two of these patents cover the allocation of storage resources among the storage volumes: one to ensure that volumes with different IO performance requirements do not share the same set of physical devices, and the other to enable applications to reserve space for snapshots. Another one covers the critical implementation that allows the storage stack to enforce ‘Quality of Service’ among the storage volumes sharing the same physical device. The next 2 patents cover the methods for implementing logical storage volumes over multiple tiers, maintaining consistency among copies of those volumes and changing a distributed storage volume from non-replicated to replicated.

Patents in this group include:

• Allocating storage requirements in a distributed storage system

• Snapshot reservations in a distributed storage system

• Window-based priority tagging of IOPs in a distributed storage system

• Storage scheme for a distributed storage system

• Implementing storage volumes over multiple tiers

Define and manage lifecycle of stateful applications on Kubernetes using application bundle construct
Three patents reflect innovations in handling bundled applications. Included are a job manager for deploying and upgrading these applications, as well as capabilities for implementing affinity and anti-affinity constraints.

Patents in this group include:

• Job manager for deploying a bundled application

• Implementing affinity and anti-affinity constraints in a bundled application

• Upgrading bundled applications in a distributed computing system

Builds momentum in 2020
The patent assignments are the latest in achievements the company has attained in 2020:

• Launched Robin Express, a full-featured, free-for-life edition and announced enhancements to the platform

• Named an IDC innovator for containerized storage

• Recognized in the GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Storage as a leader and outperformer

• Recognized in the GigaOM Radar for Kubernetes Data Protection as a leader and outperformer

• Added multi-cloud portability for complex stateful applications

• Launched on RedHat OpenShift Marketplace

• Added Jai Menon and Henri Richard to the company’s advisory board

• Partnered with Quortus Ltd. to provide next-gen, cloud-native solutions for 5G

• Qualified as a Google Cloud Anthos Ready storage solution for Anthos on bare metal