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:
May. 13, 2003
Filed:
Mar. 11, 1999
Robert Chris Hickman, DuVall, WA (US);
Alok K. Sinha, Redmond, WA (US);
Marco A. DeMello, Redmond, WA (US);
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
A massively scalable architecture for providing a highly reliable storage system that is capable of handling hundreds of millions of users and tens of billions of files. The system includes one or more clusters storing data elements that are received from a plurality of clients. Each cluster comprises a plurality of storage servers. A partition master assigns each client a unique partition within one of the clusters such that each data element is stored in the partition assigned to the client. The storage system can be easily scaled as the number of reads increases by adding individual storage servers to each storage cluster. In addition, the storage system easily scales to handle an increase in the number of writes, or as the number of files per cluster exceeds a predefined limit, by adding new storage clusters to the storage system.