Barracuda Networks, Inc.

Nicholas Tillman

Hari Potaraju

Phil Ploquin

A new approach is proposed to support appliance configuration identification and profiling management. An appliance scanning component running on an appliance is configured to scan, examine, and determine current configuration of the appliance including hardware components and/or software components installed on the appliance. The configuration of the appliance is then provided to an appliance profiling engine running on a server, wherein the appliance profiling engine hashes the configuration of the appliance into a unique identifier of the appliance and look up a model of the appliance from an appliance profiling database using the unique identifier as a key. If the configuration of the appliance is not found, the appliance profiling engine identifies discrepancies between the configuration of the appliance and other appliances in the appliance profiling database to determine if the appliance is a new model, a revision of an existing model, or is simply misconfigured.

System and method for appliance configuration identification and profile management

A new approach is proposed that contemplates systems and methods to support quick recovery of an appliance by adopting a multi-layered filesystem having a plurality of layers that enables recovery and restoration of the appliance to factory default settings in seconds. In some embodiments, the multi-layered filesystem adopts a copy-on-write paradigm for all I/O operations to the appliance to create and superimpose an overlay layer by copying data from a read-only bottom layer of the appliance for modification and recovery of the appliance. The plurality of layers of the multi-layered filesystem are also tied to a general-purpose reset button or a software interface for implementation of an instant factory reset feature. When a reset signal is sent via the reset button or the software interface, one or more of the plurality of layers of the multi-layered filesystem are modified accordingly to provide a clean factory-reset of the appliance.

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Morgan Hill, CA, United States of America

Nicholas Tillman