Minnesota Inventor Steve Soltis Assigned Patent

Steven R. Soltis, Rochester, MN, has developed a patent (8,219,639) for a "storage area network file system."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A shared storage distributed file system is presented that provides clients with access to a SAN attached storage device. The access is provided either via block-level requests over the SAN or via file-level requests made to a server over a LAN. File requests are categorized between SAN requests and LAN requests. This categorization can be based on dividing the requests between write and read requests, or between requests that alter data stored on the storage device and requests that do not alter data on the storage device. In other embodiments, the categorization can be made on the size of the file or the data involved in the file request. In one embodiment, the client is able to access and interpret metadata stored on the storage device."

The patent application was filed on May 28, 2009 (12/455,116).