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. 17, 2011
Filed:
Jun. 23, 2006
Dan Avida, Belmont, CA (US);
Serge Plotkin, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Dan Avida, Belmont, CA (US);
Serge Plotkin, Palo Alto, CA (US);
NetApp, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Abstract
An apparatus and method for connecting a plurality of computing devices, e.g. web servers, database servers, etc., to a plurality of storage devices, such as disks, disk arrays, tapes, etc., by using a stream-oriented (circuit oriented) switch that has high throughput, but that requires non-negligible time for reconfiguration is disclosed. An example of such stream-oriented switch is an optical switch. The system decodes the requests from the computing devices and uses this information to create circuits, e.g. optical paths in embodiments where the stream-oriented switch is an optical switch, through the stream-oriented switch. The system uses these circuits to route traffic between the computing devices and the storage devices. Buffering of data and control in the device memory is used to improve overall throughput and reduce the time spent on reconfigurations.