Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
2001-02-05
2004-03-09
Corrielus, Jean M. (Department: 2172)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06704730
ABSTRACT:
COPYRIGHT NOTICE/PERMISSION
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document may contain material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document of the patent disclosure as it appears in the United States Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise, reserves all copyright rights whatsoever. The following notice applies to the software and data and described below, inclusive of the drawing figures where applicable: Copyright©2000, Undoo Technologies.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates, in general, to the field of hash file systems and commonality factoring systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for determining a correspondence between electronic files in a distributed computer data environment and particular applications therefor.
Economic, political, and social power are increasingly managed by data. Transactions and wealth are represented by data. Political power is analyzed and modified based on data. Human interactions and relationships are defined by data exchanges. Hence, the efficient distribution, storage, and management of data is expected to play an increasingly vital role in human society.
The quantity of data that must be managed, in the form of computer programs, databases, files, and the like, increases exponentially. As computer processing power increases, operating system and application software becomes larger. Moreover, the desire to access larger data sets such as multimedia files and large databases further increases the quantity of data that is managed. This increasingly large data load must be transported between computing devices and stored in an accessible fashion. The exponential growth rate of data is expected to outpace the improvements in communication bandwidth and storage capacity, making data management using conventional methods even more urgent.
Many factors must be balanced and often compromised in conventional data storage systems. Because the quantity of data is extremely large, there is continuing pressure to reduce the cost per bit of storage. Also, data management systems should be scaleable to contemplate not only current needs, but future needs as well. Preferably, storage systems are incrementally scaleable so that a user can purchase only the capacity needed at any particular time. High reliability and high availability are also considered as data users are increasingly intolerant of lost, damaged, and unavailable data. Unfortunately, conventional data management architectures must compromise these factors so that no one architecture provides a cost-effective, reliable, high availability, scaleable solution.
Conventional RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) systems are a way of storing the same data in different places (thus, redundantly) on multiple storage devices such as hard disks. By placing data on multiple disks, input/output (“I/O”) operations can overlap in a balanced way, improving performance. Since the use of multiple disks increases the mean time between failure (“MTBF”), storing data redundantly also increases fault-tolerance. A RAID system relies on a hardware or software controller to hide the complexities of the actual data management so that a RAID system appears to an operating system as a single logical hard disk. However, RAID systems are difficult to scale because of physical limitations in the cabling and controllers. Also, the availability of RAID systems is highly dependent on the functionality of the controllers themselves so that when a controller fails, the data stored behind the controller becomes unavailable. Moreover, RAID systems require specialized, rather than commodity hardware, and so tend to be expensive solutions.
NAS (network-attached storage) refers to hard disk storage that is set up with its own network address rather than being attached to an application server. File requests are mapped to the NAS file server. NAS may provide transparent I/O operations using either hardware or software based RAID. NAS may also automate mirroring of data to one or more other NAS devices to further improve fault tolerance. Because NAS devices can be added to a network, they enable scaling of the total capacity of the storage available to a network. However, NAS devices are constrained in RAID applications to the abilities of the conventional RAID controllers. Also, NAS systems do not enable mirroring and parity across nodes, and so are a limited solution.
In addition to data storage issues, data transport is rapidly evolving with improvements in wide area network (“WAN”) and internetworking technology. The Internet, for example, has created a globally networked environment with almost ubiquitous access. Despite rapid network infrastructure improvements, the rate of increase in the quantity of data that requires transport is expected to outpace improvements in available bandwidth.
Philosophically, the way data is conventionally managed is inconsistent with the hardware devices and infrastructures that have been developed to manipulate and transport data. For example, computers are characteristically general-purpose machines that are readily programmed to perform a virtually unlimited variety of functions. In large part, however, computers are loaded with a fixed, slowly changing set of data that limit their general-purpose nature to make the machines special-purpose. Advances in processing speed, peripheral performance and data storage capacity are most dramatic in commodity computers. Yet many data storage solutions cannot take advantage of these advances because they are constrained rather than extended by the storage controllers upon which they are based. Similarly, the Internet was developed as a fault tolerant, multi-path interconnected network. However, network resources are conventionally implemented in specific network nodes such that failure of the node makes the resource unavailable despite the fault-tolerance of the network to which the node is connected. Continuing needs exist for high availability, high reliability, highly scaleable data storage solutions.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
Disclosed herein is a system and method for a computer file system that is based and organized upon hashes and/or strings of digits of certain, different, or changing lengths and which is capable of eliminating or screening redundant copies of the blocks of data (or parts of data blocks) from the system. Also disclosed herein is a system and method for a computer file system wherein hashes may be produced by a checksum generating program, engine or algorithm such as industry standard Message Digest 4 (“MD4”), MD5, Secure Hash Algorithm (“SHA”) or SHA-1 algorithms. Further disclosed herein is a system and method for a computer file system wherein hashes may be generated by a checksum program, engine, algorithm or other means that generates a probabilistically unique hash value for a block of data of indeterminate size based upon a non-linear probablistic mathematical algorithm or any industry standard technique for generating pseudo-random values from an input text of other data
umeric sequence.
The system and method of the present invention may be utilized, in a particular application disclosed herein, to automatically factor out redundancies in data allowing potentially very large quantities of unfactored storage to be often reduced in size by several orders of magnitude. In this regard, the system and method of the present invention would allow all computers, regardless of their particular hardware or software characteristics, to share data simply, efficiently and securely and to provide a uniquely advantageous means for effectuating the reading, writing or referencing of data. The system and method of the present invention is especially efficacious with respect to networked computers or computer systems but may also be applied to isolated data storage with comparable results.
The hash file system of the present invention advantage
Moulton Gregory Hagan
Whitehill Stephen B.
Avamar Technologies, Inc.
Bernard Eugene J.
Corrielus Jean M.
Hogan & Hartson LLP
Kubida William J.
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