Dell Assigned Patent

Dell Products, Round Rock, TX, has been assigned a patent (8,452,941) developed by William Price Dawkins, Jonestown, TX, and Stephen Gouze Luning, Austin, TX, for a "system and method for distributing random and sequential data in a tiered storage system."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "This disclosure provides a method for assigning data in an information handling system including a plurality of physical storage resources comprising a first tier and a second tier which has a lower performance and cost relative to capacity than the first tier. A tier manager may be hosted on the information handling system and in electronic communication with the plurality physical storage resources. The tier manager may, for each page: determine a seek distance value, determine an operation rate, determine an operation size value, determine an elapsed time value, and calculate a relative randomness value using the seek distance value, operation rate, operation size value, and elapsed time value determined for each page. A classification module may assign a physical location for each page such that the relative randomness value for each page in the first tier is greater than in the second tier."

The patent application was filed on Sept. 23, 2009 (12/565,258).