Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Symantec Operating Corporation

Apple Inc.

Oracle America, Inc.

Other

Oracle International Corporation

Veritas Technologies LLC

Thomas E Saulpaugh

Gregory L Slaughter

Bernard A Traversat

Michael J Duigou

Mohamed M Abdelaziz

Eric Pouyoul

Jeffrey Alan Schmidt

John A Muth

Ruchir Tewari

Sunil Keshav Bopardikar

Russell T Williams

Gregory K Slaughter

William N Joy

William J Yeager

Jano D Banks

Li Gong

Jean-Christophe Hugly

Michael J Clary

David Frank Harrison

Steven J Szymanski

Holly N Knight

Xiaoyan Zheng

Ron Hochsprung

Matthew R Nelson

Anindya Banerjee

Dilip Madhusudan Ranade

Kuldipsingh A Pabla

Hsiao-Keng Jerry Chu

William J Tracey, Ii

Andrew K Krumel

Yuh-yen Yeh

Robert Rodriguez

Bill M Bruffey

William J Keenan

Marc P Kwiatkowski

Steve Woodward

Pradeep Kathail

Xiaohui Dawn Chen

Girish Jorapurkar

Donald Hudson, Jr

Zi-Hui Li

David E Bohman, Ii

Dawn Chen

Xiaohui “Dawn” Chen

Mark P Kwiatkowski

Laurent Demailly

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

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 system and method supporting communication sessions for nodes in a network. A sender node may initiate a send operation to send a message to one or more receiver nodes. For each receiver node, the message may pass from the sender node to the receiver node via a path including a plurality of nodes. At each node through which the message passes, the node may store state information regarding the message. The state information may include information specifying a link via which the message was received. Each receiver node may issue one or more replies to the message. The replies from each receiver node may pass from the receiver node to the sender node via the same path by which the message reached the respective receiver node. This may be accomplished using the state information stored on each node in the path.

Communication sessions for a computer network

Embodiments of a system and method using message authentication with message gates are described. A message gate is the message endpoint for a client or service in a distributed computing environment. A message gate may provide a secure endpoint that sends and receives type-safe messages. Gates may perform the sending and receiving of messages between clients and services using a protocol specified in a service advertisement. In one embodiment, the messages are eXtensible Markup Language (XML) messages. For a client, a message gate represents the authority to use some or all of a service's capabilities. Each capability may be expressed in terms of a message that may be sent to the service. Creation of a message gate may involve an authentication service that may authenticate the client and/or service and that generates an authentication credential. A message gate may perform verification of messages against a message schema to ensure that the messages are allowed. Message gates may embed the authentication credential in outgoing messages so that the receiving message gate may authenticate the message. Messages may also include information to allow the receiving gate to verify that the message has not been compromised prior to receipt.

Message authentication using message gates in a distributed computing environment

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Thomas E Saulpaugh