Hitachi Assigned Two Patents

Allocating storage capacities to plural pools
Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, has been assigned a patent (8,447,947) developed by Yasunori Kaneda, San Jose, CA, for a "method and interface for allocating storage capacities to plural pools."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Exemplary embodiments of the invention provide protocols and interfaces for avoiding waste capacity allocation from the storage apparatus to plural pools. In one embodiment, a storage system comprises a processor; a memory; and a storage controller. The storage controller is configured to: receive a declare chunk size command with a pool identifier for a pool among a plurality of pools, the declare chunk size command specifying a desired chunk size at the pool; receive an allocate chunk command with a pool identifier for allocating a chunk to a logical volume; and provide chunks of different chunk sizes to different pools with different pool identifiers, according to the desired chunk sizes of different declare chunk size commands and in response to different allocate chunk commands."

The patent application was filed on Feb. 17, 2010 (12/707,185).

Backup and restore of thin provisioning volume
Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, has been assigned a patent (8,452,930) developed by Yasuyuki Mimatsu, Cupertino, CA, for "methods and apparatus for backup and restore of thin provisioning volume."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Methods and apparatuses for backing up virtual volumes effectively by eliminating transfer and preservation of parts of virtual volumes, which contain no data. By representing virtual volumes as virtual files in a virtual file system, it is thereby possible to avoid needlessly backing up empty data space in the virtual volume. In one implementation, a storage system includes multiple virtual volumes and a virtual file system as well as a storage system control module. Each virtual volume in the multiple virtual volumes is represented as a virtual file within the virtual file system with each virtual file representing data actually stored within the virtual volume; and the storage system control module facilitates backing up a selected virtual volume, the operations involving accessing the virtual file system on the storage system; and reading the virtual file corresponding to the selected virtual volume."

The patent application was filed on March 27, 2009 (12/413,406).