John Robert O'Brien
Physician at Legend Trl, Westminster, CO

5396620, Mar 7, 1995

Dec 21, 1993

8/171113

Mitchell E. Burghart - Louisville CO
John T. O'Brien - Louisville CO

Storage Technology Corporation - Louisville CO

G06F 1100

395575

The present invention comprises a method for enhancing data integrity during write operations in a data storage subsystem which comprises an array of redundant, interconnected disk drives. A data storage subsystem is disclosed which provides for writing data segments spread across N disk drives of the array and provides for generating and recording redundancy information spread across M disk drives. Redundancy information is used for reconstructing erroneous data in the case of a disk drive failure. It may be desirable to write a final portion of the data last, after other portions of the data and associated redundancy information have been recorded to the disk drives. The last portion of the data segments may contain information that validates the data. It is common to automatically generate the redundancy information as the data is written to the disk drives. The generated redundancy information is then later written to the disk drives.

7096341, Aug 22, 2006

Dec 17, 2003

10/738389

John Timothy O'Brien - Louisville CO, US

Storage Technology Corporation - Louisville CO

G06F 12/06

711210, 711156

In a data storage system in which there can be multiple references to a single instance of an object, a method for regenerating the number of references to each object instance. The method includes radix sorting the references to the objects to generate a reference list, counting the references to each unique object and merging the counts with the object descriptions, placing the count of the number of references to each object into the respective object description. The sorting, counting and merging techniques used by this method generate sequential memory access patterns that enable efficient use of low-cost memory and block-oriented memory access interconnect fabric protocols. Furthermore, multiple instances of the sorting, counting and merging processes can be used in parallel to reduce the time required to regenerate the reference counts for a large number of objects.

5379391, Jan 3, 1995

Mar 1, 1991

7/663099

Jay S. Belsan - Nederland CO
John T. O'Brien - Louisville CO

Storage Technology Corporation - Louisville CO

G06F 1200, G06F 1216, G06F 1300

395400

The data record copy apparatus for a virtual memory system instantaneously makes a copy of a selected data record by simply generating a new set of pointers to reference the same physical memory location as the original reference pointer. All the pointers referencing the same physical memory space are stored in the virtual memory mapping tables to record all the virtual addresses of the data record. When the original data record is staged to an associated cache memory or a copy of the data record is in cache memory, the consistency of the data record is maintained by loading all the virtual addresses of the data record from the mapping tables to the hash table and collision list of the cache memory. Thus, any access of one of these virtual addresses will result in the virtual memory system locating the single data record instance in cache memory. If an associated host processor attempts to update the data record at one of these virtual addresses, the virtual memory system copies the data record to a new cache memory location so that a unique instance of the data record is available for update while the remaining virtual addresses still point to the original data record in cache memory.

4988998, Jan 29, 1991

Sep 5, 1989

7/403084

John T. O'Brien - Louisville CO

Storage Technology Corporation - Louisville CO

H03M 730, H03M 746

341 55

The improved data compression system concurrently processes both strings of repeated characters and textual substitution of input character strings. In this system, the performance of data compression techniques based on textual substitution are improved by the use of a compact representation for identifying instances in which a character in the input data stream is repeated. This is accomplished by nesting a run length encoding system in the textual substitution system. This structure adds the recognition of runs of a repeated character before the processor performs the textual substituted data compression operation. A further performance improvement is obtained by expanding the alphabet of symbols stored in the compressor's dictionary to include both the characters of the input data stream and repeat counts which indicate the repetition of a character. The handling of these repeat counts by the textual substitution based compression technique is no different than the handling of characters, or certain modifications are made in the handling of repeat counts.

2010025, Sep 30, 2010

Mar 30, 2009

12/414084

John Timothy O'Brien - Louisville CO, US
Michael Steven Milillo - Louisville CO, US

SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. - Santa Clara CA

G06F 15/16

709217

A data storage system includes a plurality of servers, a plurality of external interface providers each deployed on one of the servers, and a plurality of data storage controllers each deployed on one of the servers. Each of the providers is configured to receive a data access request, to identify one of the controllers that can satisfy the request, and to forward the request to the identified controller. The system further includes a plurality of data storage modules independent of the servers. The providers, controllers and modules are in communication with each other. Each of the controllers exclusively manages a portion of data content in at least one of the modules, and satisfies data access requests received from the providers by accessing the portion of data content in the at least one module.

8032686, Oct 4, 2011

Apr 30, 2009

12/433300

John Timothy O'Brien - Louisville CO, US

Oracle America, Inc. - Redwood City CA

G06F 13/36, G06F 13/28, G06F 15/16

710315, 710 22, 710 26, 710305, 710308, 709203, 709212, 709213, 370412, 370463, 370466

A data storage system includes an input/output server and a storage unit. The input/output server includes a processor, memory, and a host channel adapter. The storage unit includes a processor, memory, and a storage module. The storage module includes a storage controller, and an interface block for connecting the storage module to a corresponding memory-mapped interface. The storage unit further includes a host channel adaptor. The storage unit host channel adapter is connected to a corresponding memory-mapped interface. The storage unit host channel adapter is capable of remote direct memory access to the input/output server. Protocol translation logic is configured to intercept a memory access request from the storage controller, and initiate a corresponding remote direct memory access to the input/output server through the storage unit host channel adapter and the input/output server host channel adapter.

5247638, Sep 21, 1993

Jun 18, 1990

7/540219

John T. O'Brien - Louisville CO
George A. Rudeseal - Boulder CO
Charles A. Milligan - Golden CO
Craig A. Buhlman - Boulder CO

Storage Technology Corporation - Louisville CO

G06F 1200, G06F 1210, G06F 1116, H03M 730

395425

The use of a dynamically mapped virtual memory system permits the storage of data so that each data record occupies only the physical space required for the data. Furthermore, the data storage subsystem manages the allocation of physical space on the disk drives and does not rely on the file extent defined in the count key data format. Data compaction apparatus is provided to remove the gaps contained in the stream of count key data records received from the host processor. A data compression algorithm is then used to compress the received data into a compressed format for storage on the disk drives. It is the compacted, compressed data that is finally stored on the disk drives. Furthermore, any data record received from the host processor absent data in the user data field therein is simply listed in the virtual memory map as a null field occupying no physical space on the disk drives. The data storage control, through its mapping capability, stores the actual data in the minimum physical space required by overcoming the limitations imposed on large form factor disk drives by the use of count key data format data records. However, the data storage subsystem returns this stored data to the host processor in count key data format through a data record reformatting process once the stored compacted compressed data is staged to the cache memory for access by the host processor.

7080133, Jul 18, 2006

Jul 17, 2000

09/617607

Scott Burton - Westminster CO, US
Richard Curtis Cleavinger - San Diego CA, US
Nelson W. Gildenmeister - Broomfield CO, US
John Houkal - Louisville CO, US
Kevin Kidney - Lafayette CO, US
John Timothy O'Brien - Louisville CO, US
Kent D. Prosch - Boulder CO, US

International Business Machines Corporation - Armonk NY

G06F 15/177, G06F 15/16

709221, 709251

A method for configuring a computer network that includes a full duplex bi-directional first port and an initiator that can issue a request for the first port to assume a state. The first port, when in a first state, is able to bi-directionally communicate with a full duplex bi-directional second port, and when in a second state, is coupled to itself by having an output thereof coupled to an input thereof. The method comprises inhibiting the initiator from issuing the request, sending data to the initiator describing a desired state of the first port, and enabling the initiator to issue the request for the first port to assume the desired state.

6141771, Oct 31, 2000

Feb 6, 1998

9/019768

John Timothy O'Brien - Louisville CO
David G. Hostetter - Boulder CO

International Business Machines Corporation - Armonk NY

G06F 1100

714 15

A system and method for providing a trusted machine state in a data processing system is disclosed. The data processing system includes a memory. The trusted machine state is stored in a first portion of the memory. The method and system include saving the trusted machine state in a second portion of the memory and reinitializing a portion of the memory. The portion of memory is separate from the second of memory. The method and system further include restoring the trusted machine state in the memory. According to the method and system disclosed herein, the data processing system may recover from failures and resume operation. Moreover, a non-disruptive code load, in which a new program can be loaded without disrupting system operations, may be performed.

5410667, Apr 25, 1995

Apr 17, 1992

7/870573

Jay S. Belsan - Nederland CO
Charles A. Milligan - Golden CO
John T. O'Brien - Louisville CO
George A. Rudeseal - Boulder CO

Storage Technology Corporation - Louisville CO

G06F 1200

395425

The disk drive array data storage subsystem maps between virtual and physical data storage devices and schedules the writing of data to these devices. The data storage subsystem functions as a conventional large form factor disk drive memory, using an array of redundancy groups, each containing N+M disk drives. This system copies data records by simply creating a duplicate data record pointer in a virtual track directory to reference the original data record. This enables the host processor to access the data record via two virtual addresses while only a single physical copy of the data record resides in the data storage subsystem.