Storediq, Inc.

International Business Machines Corporation

Bradley Might

Laura Arbilla

Keith T Zoellner

Peter A Lee

Jeff G Bone

A Paul Jimenez

Brett A Funderburg

Jeremy Kaplan

Morry Belkin

Disclosed are systems, methods and apparatuses for managing objects (files and directories) in network file systems according to policies. Each policy may have one or more rules, each of which ties a condition to an action. Each condition can be expressed in terms of metadata harvested across file systems and stored in a metadata repository. The actions are user-programmable. Users can apply and/or enforce a policy by manipulating the metadata stored in the metadata repository. For example, suppose a policy prohibits storing MP3 files in corporate storage, a user can specify a rule that ties the condition 'no MP3 files in volumes A-Z' to an action 'delete MP3 files from volumes A-Z.' A file management application may apply a filter to the metadata repository to produce metadata records having values that meet the specified condition and take the corresponding action on managed objects associated with those metadata records.

System, method and apparatus for enterprise policy management

A harvester is disclosed for harvesting metadata of managed objects (files and directories) across file systems which are generally not interoperable in an enterprise environment. Harvested metadata may include 1) file system attributes such as size, owner, recency; 2) content-specific attributes such as the presence or absence of various keywords (or combinations of keywords) within documents as well as concepts comprised of natural language entities; 3) synthetic attributes such as mathematical checksums or hashes of file contents; and 4) high-level semantic attributes that serve to classify and categorize files and documents. The classification itself can trigger an action in compliance with a policy rule. Harvested metadata are stored in a metadata repository to facilitate the automated or semi-automated application of policies.

Harvesting file system metsdata

Disclosed are systems, methods and apparatuses for managing objects in an enterprise environment according to policies. According to the invention, each policy rule ties a condition that conceptually lives in a repository to an appropriate action(s). Since each condition can be expressed in terms of metadata, policies can be applied and enforced over managed objects (files and directories) by allowing users to program appropriate corresponding action(s) via manipulating metadata stored in a metadata repository, e.g., a policy could prohibit storing MP3 files in corporate storage. In one embodiment, a user can specify a policy rule that ties the condition 'no MP3 files in volumes A-Z' to an action 'delete MP3 files from volumes A-Z' via a Web-based user interface. A harvester is disclosed for harvesting metadata across file systems.

Method and apparatus for harvesting file system metadata

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Round Rock, TX, United States of America

Bradley Might