The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jun. 02, 2020
Filed:
Jan. 23, 2018
Vmware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA (US);
Oleg Zaydman, San Jose, CA (US);
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA (US);
Abstract
A 'grain' is a unit of space allocation in a virtual disk. Grains are represented in physical storage only when used, that is, when they contain data. Grains may be located in storage using an in-memory grain-range table. The grain-range table is derived from a grain table in storage. A grain-range table includes entries for the starting grains of incrementing and or decrementing ranges; grain-table entries that do not start a range are omitted in the grain-range table. Accordingly, a grain-range table can serve as a compressed form of a grain table. This compression makes it feasible to store large numbers of grain-range tables in memory in cases where it would not be feasible to store the corresponding grain tables in memory. As a result, one rather than two storage accesses are require per storage access request, resulting in a substantial performance improvement.