Riverbed Technology, Inc.

Vivasvat Keswani

David Tze-Si Wu

Nitin Gupta

Case Larsen

Kartik Subbana

Soren Lasen

Adityashankar Kini

Nitin Parab

Shashidhar Merugu

Kartik Subbanna

Charles Huang

Bart Robinson

Daniel Conor O'Sullivan

Steven James Procter

Network proxies reduce server latency in response to series of requests from client applications. Network proxies intercept messages clients and a server. Intercepted client requests are compared with rules. When client requests match a rule, additional request messages are forwarded to the server on behalf of a client application. In response to the additional request messages, the server provides corresponding response messages. A network proxy intercepts and caches the response messages. Subsequent client requests are intercepted by the network application proxy and compared with the cached messages. If a cached response message corresponds with a client request message, the response message is returned to the client application immediately instead of re-requesting the same information from the server. A server-side network proxy can compare client requests with the rules and send additional request messages. The corresponding response messages can be forwarded to a client-side network proxy for caching.

Rules-based transactions prefetching using connection end-point proxies

Network traffic is monitored and an optimal framing heuristic is automatically determined and applied. Framing heuristics specify different rules for framing network traffic. While a framing heuristic is applied to the network traffic, alternative framing heuristics are speculatively evaluated for the network traffic. The results of these evaluations are used to rank the framing heuristics. The framing heuristic with the best rank is selected for framing subsequent network traffic. Each client/server traffic flow may have a separate framing heuristic. The framing heuristics may be deterministic based on byte count and/or time or based on traffic characteristics that indicate a plausible point for framing to occur. The choice of available framing heuristics may be determined partly by manual configuration, which specifies which framing heuristics are available, and partly by automatic processes, which determine the best framing heuristic to apply to the current network traffic from the set of available framing heuristics.

Automatic framing selection

The cloud storage services are extended with a cloud storage service access protocol that enables users to specify a desired storage tier for each data stream. In response to receiving storage tier specifiers via the protocol, the cloud storage service performs storage operations to identify target storage devices having attributes matching those associated with the requested storage tier. The cloud storage service stores a data stream from the storage client in the identified target storage device associated with the desired storage tier. Storage tiers can be defined based on criteria including capacity costs; access latency; availability; activation state; bandwidth and/or transfer rates; and data replication. The cloud storage service protocol allows data streams to be transferred between storage tiers, storage devices to be activated or deactivated, and data streams to be prefetched and cached. The cloud storage services may charge storage clients based on storage tier use and associated operations.

Tiered storage interface

Association information is used to build association trees to associate base pages and embedded objects at a proxy. An association tree has a root node containing a URL for a base page, and zero or more leaf nodes each containing a URL for an embedded object. In most cases, an association tree will maintain the invariant that all leaves contain distinct URLs. However, it is also possible to have an association tree in which the same URL appears in multiple nodes. An association tree may optionally contain one or more internal nodes, each of which contains a URL that is an embedded object for some other base page, but which may also be fetched as a base page itself. Given a number of association trees and a base-page URL, a prefetch system finds the root or interior node corresponding to that URL (if any) and traverses the tree from that node, prefetching URLs until the URL of the last leaf node is prefetched. The prefetching starts the process of bringing over the various embedded objects before the user or program would ordinarily fetch them.

Method and apparatus for acceleration by prefetching associated objects

In a system where transactions are accelerated with asynchronous writes that require acknowledgements, with pre-acknowledging writes at a source of the writes, a destination-side transaction accelerator includes a queue for queue writes to a destination, at least some of the writes being pre-acknowledged by a source-side transaction accelerator prior to the write completing at the destination, a memory for storing a status of a destination-side queue and possibly other determinants, and logic for signaling to the source-side transaction accelerator with instructions to alter pre-acknowledgement rules to hold off on and pursue pre-acknowledgements based on the destination-side queue status. The rules can take into account adjusting the flow of pre-acknowledged requests or pre-acknowledgements at the sender-side transaction accelerator based at least on the computed logical length.

Throttling of predictive ACKs in an accelerated network communication system

Rules-based transaction prefetching using connection end-point proxies

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

Vivasvat Keswani