Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Symantec Operating Corporation

Oracle America, Inc.

International Business Machines Corporation

Oracle International Corporation

Symantec Corporation

Veritas Technologies LLC

Gregory L Slaughter

Thomas E Saulpaugh

Bernard A Traversat

Michael J Duigou

Mohamed M Abdelaziz

Eric Pouyoul

Jeffrey Alan Schmidt

John A Muth

Tom Saulpaugh

Ruchir Tewari

Xiaoyan Zheng

Andrew K Krumel

Robert J Block

Robert Herndon

William N Joy

William J Yeager

Li Gong

Jean-Christophe Hugly

Michael J Clary

Paul Czarnik

Xiaohui Dawn Chen

Girish Jorapurkar

Kuldipsingh A Pabla

Hsiao-Keng Jerry Chu

Paul L Borrill

Kai Chiu Wong

William J Tracey, Ii

Yuh-yen Yeh

Robert Rodriguez

Matthew R Nelson

Marc P Kwiatkowski

Steve Woodward

Xiaohui “Dawn” Chen

Dawn Chen

Mark P Kwiatkowski

Laurent Demailly

Donald Hudson, Jr

A system and method for efficiently accessing replicas of a storage object. A first node may perform a find operation to determine a plurality of nodes that each store a replica of a first storage object. For each node in the plurality of nodes, the first node may establish a direct connection to the node. The first node may then access the replicas of the first storage object using the respective direct connections to the plurality of nodes. In one embodiment, the nodes may be nodes in a peer-to-peer network. Establishing a direct connection to each storage object replica may enable the first node to communicate with each node in a single hop without having to pass messages via intermediate nodes in the peer-to-peer network.

Direct connections to a plurality of storage object replicas in a computer network

A mechanism for describing dynamic display objects in a distributed computing environment is described. A service in a distributed computing environment may generate results data for a client in response to client requests. The service may provide schemas describing the presentation characteristics of results data. The schemas may include information for use in presenting the results data. The results data may include data elements, and the presentation schema may include presentation elements each including information describing the presentation characteristics of one or more of the data elements. The client may map data elements to corresponding presentation elements from the schema, and may use the element corresponding to a data element to present the data element. Using the dynamic display objects, display behavior may be altered without having to rebuild code.

Dynamic displays in a distributed computing environment

A system and method for performing goal-oriented storage management for a distributed data storage network. Storage management software may execute on each node to cause the distributed data storage network to converge toward a system-wide storage goal. In various embodiments, the system-wide storage goal may be defined to accomplish any of various kinds of optimizations or performance improvements for the system, such as balancing storage utilization, achieving appropriate data replication, increasing performance, increasing fault tolerance, etc.

Goal-oriented storage management for a distributed data storage network

A plurality of routing entries may be stored in a routing table. Each routing entry may include information usable for routing a message through a network. As new routing entries are received or created, each new routing entry may be added to the routing table. However, if there is not sufficient memory or storage to add the new routing entry to the routing table, then the least recently used existing routing entry in the routing table may be replaced with the new routing entry. In the event that the replaced routing entry is needed later, the replaced routing entry may be re-created.

Managing routing information for a computer network

A first node in the network may broadcast a recovery request via one or more links to one or more other nodes. The recovery request may specify a first address, where the first address is associated with one or more nodes in the network. Nodes may receive and forward the recovery request until every node with which the first address is associated receives the recovery request and returns a recovery response. The recovery responses may be used to create route information for routing a message to each node with which the first address is associated.

Peer-to-peer network with recovery capability

A peer-to-peer platform that may provide mechanisms through which peers may discover each other, communicate with each other, and cooperate with each other to form peer groups is described. The peer-to-peer platform may comprise several layers including a peer-to-peer platform layer, a peer-to-peer services layer, and a peer-to-peer applications layer. At the highest abstraction level, the peer-to-peer platform may be viewed as a set of protocols. Each protocol may be defined by one or more messages exchanged among participants of the protocol. In one embodiment, the peer-to-peer platform may include, but is not limited to, one or more of a peer discovery protocol, a peer resolver protocol, a peer information protocol, a peer membership protocol, a pipe binding protocol, and an endpoint routing protocol. To underpin this set of protocols, the peer-to-peer platform may define a number of concepts including peer, peer group, advertisement, message, pipe, and endpoint.

Peer-to-peer network computing platform

In a distributed computing environment, a service advertisement may include information for a client to access a particular service. A service may publish the service advertisement in a space which stores documents such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents. The advertisement may include a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and an XML schema for the service that specifies XML messages which are usable to invoke functions of the service. A client may access the space and read the advertisement to construct a gate for access to the service. The client may send a first XML message to the service at the URI, wherein the first XML message is specified in the XML schema, to invoke one or more functions of the service. The service may send a second message specified in the XML schema (e.g., a message including the results of the invoked function(s)) to the client.

Mechanism and apparatus for accessing and addressing services in a distributed computing environment

Embodiments of event message endpoints in a distributed computing environment are described. A set of event messages that may be generated by a service in the distributed computing environment may be described in a data representation language event message schema for the service. For each event message in the schema, the endpoint may subscribe as a consumer of the event. A service may send a message including a data representation language representation of the event to each event message endpoint subscribed to the event. The event message endpoint may extract the representation of the event from the message and distribute it to clients with registered interest in the event type. The event message endpoint may type check the event message and/or the representation of the event against the message schema. Event messages endpoints may also authenticate the sender of the message and verify the integrity of message.

Event message endpoints in a distributed computing environment

A system and method for handling un-partitioning of a computer network are disclosed. Routing information may be stored on a first node in the network when the network is partitioned into a first group of nodes and a second group of nodes, where the first node is in the first group of nodes. Storing the routing information on the first node may include storing information usable to route messages to nodes in the first group of nodes. A technique for determining when the second group of nodes has become un-partitioned from the first group of nodes (i.e., for determining when the partition has been repaired) may be employed. In response to determining that the second group of nodes has become un-partitioned from the first group of nodes, the routing information on the first node may be modified. Modifying the routing information on the first node may include storing information useable to route messages to nodes in the second group of nodes.

Handling un-partitioning of a computer network

Various embodiments of a system and method related to a topology and routing model for a peer-to-peer network are disclosed. A plurality of nodes may be coupled to each other to form a peer-to-peer network. A routing table may be created on each node in the peer-to-peer network. Each node may be operable to route messages to other nodes in the peer-to-peer network using information stored in the routing table. Messages may be propagated among nodes in the peer-to-peer network in a decentralized manner. For example, the peer-to-peer network may not utilize centralized servers of any kind. Each node in the peer-to-peer network may perform substantially the same routing functionality.

Topology and routing model for a computer network

A service discovery mechanism may allow clients in a distributed computing environment to search for services. The service discovery mechanism may allow a client to request a capability credential from a service. In one embodiment, the client may present to the service a set of desired capabilities. The service may then respond with a capability credential that may convey to the client the rights to use the requested capabilities. A complete service advertisement may be needed to create a message endpoint for accessing the service. In an embodiment, the capability credential may be used by a client to obtain a complete advertisement for the requested capabilities. The capability credential may provide an additional level of security for the service provider. The capability credential that may be used to receive the complete advertisement may also be used to construct a message gate to communicate with the service where the gate embeds the capability credential in each message to the service.

Method and apparatus to obtain service capability credentials

A method and system for implementing a global name space service. The method may include receiving a file system unique identifier corresponding to a particular file and a human-readable name corresponding to the same file. The method may further include binding the human-readable name to the file system unique identifier, thereby creating a mapping between the human-readable name and the file system unique identifier. The system may include a processor coupled to a memory and to a global name space service manager. The global name space service manager may be configured to receive a file system unique identifier corresponding to a particular file and a human-readable name corresponding to the same file. The global name space service manager may be further configured to bind the human-readable name to the file system unique identifier, thereby creating a mapping between the human-readable name and the file system unique identifier.

Method and system for implementing a global name space service

Growing community of inventors

Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Gregory L Slaughter