Huawei Technologies Assigned Eight Patents

Storage method
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China, has been assigned a patent (10,972,542) developed by Sun, Guilin, Liu, Huaizhong, Zha, Li, Beijing, China, and Xin, Xianyin, Shenzhen, China, for “data storage method and apparatus.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A method and apparatus for data storage and retrieval is disclosed. In the method, a data storage device receives a data write request that is sent by a first tenant, and determines, from a plurality of resource zones (RZs) and based on the data write request and storage permission of the first tenant for each of the plurality of resource zones RZs. The data storage device further determines distribution of N duplicates in the at least one RZ based on the data write request and a first data distribution policy, and stores the N duplicates into at least one node corresponding to the at least one RZ based on distribution of the N duplicates in the at least one RZ and a second data distribution policy.”

The patent application was filed on September 27, 2019 (Appl. No.16/586,074).

Storage device operation and physical server
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China, has been assigned a patent (10,970,105) developed by Wang, Shen, Xi’an, China, for “storage device operation method and physical server.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A storage device operation method is applied to the physical server. A storage card is inserted into the physical server. When a virtual machine on the physical server receives a data read/write instruction, the virtual machine generates an I/O request for a physical storage device, and sends the I/O request to a client in the storage card, the client transmits the I/O request to a server, so that the server performs an I/O operation on the physical storage device based on the I/O request. Since the virtual machine directly sends the I/O request to the client in the storage card without using a hypervisor in the physical server, computing resources of the physical server are conserved.”

The patent application was filed on April 26, 2019 (Appl. No.16/396,213).

Data access, routing and storage
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China, has been assigned a patent (10,956,077) developed by Li, Tianxiang, Beijing, China, Xu, Jun, Nanjing, China, and Wang, Yuangang, Shenzhen, China, for “data access method, routing apparatus, and storage system.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A data access method, a routing apparatus, and a storage system are provided. The method is applied to a storage system including a first storage device, a second storage device, and a routing apparatus. A logical unit in each storage device includes at least one first-type logical block and at least one second-type logical block. According to the method, when sending access requests to the storage devices in the storage system according to a preset rule, the routing apparatus sends access requests corresponding to same target logical blocks to one of the storage devices according to a preset rule. This reduces network overheads between the storage system and the application server, and improves efficiency of processing the access requests by the storage system.”

The patent application was filed on March 15, 2019 (Appl. No.16/355,595).

Storing data shards
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China, has been assigned a patent (10,942,828) developed by Wang, Huaqiong, Shenzhen, China, and Gao, Chao, Hangzhou, China, for “method for storing data shards, apparatus, and system.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”This application relates to distributed storage, and in particular, to a distributed shard storage technology. In a method for storing data shards in a distributed storage system, M data nodes on which to-be-stored data will be stored are determined, N replicas of the to-be-stored data are obtained, and each of the N replicas is sharded into X data shards in a same sharding mode. Then the to-be-stored data is stored on the M storage nodes, that is, N replicas of each of the X data shards are respectively stored on N storage nodes, and a quantity of data shards whose data shard replicas are stored on same N storage nodes is P or P+1, where P is an integer quotient of X divided by C.sub.M.sup.N.”

The patent application was filed on February 7, 2019 (Appl. No.16/270,048).

Storage method, apparatus, and system
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China, has been assigned a patent (10,915,397) developed by Liu, Xiaowei, Wu, Huatao, and Yin, Lihui, Chengdu, China, for “data storage method, apparatus, and system.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A storage client needs to store to-be-written data into a distributed storage system, and storage nodes corresponding to a first data unit assigned for the to-be-written data by a management server are only some nodes in a storage node group. When receiving a status of the first data unit returned by the management server, the storage client may determine quantities of data blocks and parity blocks needing to be generated during EC coding on the to-be-written data. The storage client stores the generated data blocks and parity blocks into some storage nodes designated by the management server in a partition where the first data unit is located. Accordingly, dynamic adjustment of an EC redundancy ratio is implemented, and the management server may exclude some nodes in the partition from a storage range of the to-be-written data based on a requirement, thereby reducing a data storage IO amount.”

The patent application was filed on April 12, 2019 (Appl. No.16/382,200).

Writing multiple copies into storage
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China, has been assigned a patent (10,901,914) developed by Li, Xiaohua, Ouyang, Ji, and Wang, Qi, Chengdu, China, for “method for writing multiple copies into storage device, and storage device.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A method for writing multiple copies into a storage device includes receiving a first write data request that includes an identity (ID) of a first logical storage unit, target data, and a logical block address (LBA) of the first logical storage unit, determining that data stored in storage space corresponding to the LBA of the first logical storage unit is not accessed by another data access request, writing the target data into the storage space corresponding to the LBA of the first logical storage unit, generating a second write data request that includes an ID of a second logical storage unit, the target data, and an LBA of the second logical storage unit, and writing the target data into storage space corresponding to the LBA of the second logical storage unit.”

The patent application was filed on August 14, 2017 (Appl. No.15/676,043).

Managing health of storage medium
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China, has been assigned a patent (10,901,629) developed by Hou, Jiancen, and Tang, Kun, Chengdu, China, for “method and apparatus for managing health of a storage medium in a storage device.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A method for managing a storage medium in a storage device is provided. The method includes detecting whether there is a problematic storage block in a data storage area of the storage medium, wherein the problematic storage block is a storage block whose health degree is less than a preset value, wherein the health degree is used to measure performance of a storage block in the storage medium and is in direct proportion to the performance of the storage block, and replacing the problematic storage block with a replacement storage block in a replacement area of the storage medium when the problematic storage block is detected, wherein a health degree of a storage block in the data storage area is greater than a health degree of a storage block in the replacement area.”

The patent application was filed on June 4, 2019 (Appl. No.16/431,177).

Storage controller and IO request processing
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China, has been assigned a patent (10,884,667) developed by Yu, Si, Gong, Junhui, Zhao, Cong, Wang, Cheng, and Lu, Yue, Hangzhou, China, for “storage controller and IO request processing method.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”This application relates to the field of storage technologies, and discloses a storage controller. The storage controller includes a distribution core, a plurality of ranking cores, and a request processing core. The three types of cores are respectively configured to: distribute IO requests to different ranking cores, generate a processing ranking index for each IO request, and process the IO request based on a value of the processing ranking index of the IO request, to flexibly schedule an IO request received by the storage controller.”

The patent application was filed on July 5, 2019 (Appl. No.16/503,817).