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:
Nov. 23, 2004
Filed:
May. 07, 2004
Douglas J. Cameron, Woodinville, WA (US);
3PARdata, Inc., Fremont, CA (US);
Abstract
A method is provided to allow a system administrator of a utility storage server to provision virtual volumes several times larger than the amount of physical storage within the storage server. A virtual volume is a virtual representation of multiple disks as a single large volume to a host or an application. In one embodiment, a virtual volume comprises an exception list containing the set of differences from dummy base volume consisting of all zeros. This exception list can be made up of address tables that map virtual volume pages to logical disk pages. As storage demand grows, additional storage is allocated for the address tables and the data pages from separate pools of storage. If any of the pools runs low, more logical disk regions are allocated to that pool.