Ibrix Wins Patents

BILLERICA, Mass. -- IBRIX Inc., the leader in scalable file serving solutions, today announced it was granted two more patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for technology advancing distributed file systems. The innovations covered by the newly granted patents enhance the company’s award-winning product, IBRIX Fusion™, with data allocation and directory capabilities in enterprise storage environments.

The first of the new patents, “Shadow Directory Structure in a Distributed Segmented File System” (No. 7,430,570), can be deployed in high performing computing environments to achieve parallel data consistency checking. The directory can also reconstruct lost data in the event of a system failure. If a system hardware component is not working properly or a service interruption occurs, the shadow directory ensures usability and continuity as the data remains in a consistent state and users maintain the ability to access files. The second patent, “Storage Allocation in a Distributed Segmented File System” (No. 7,406,484), addresses how data is distributed across the file system and greatly improves scalability throughout clustered enterprise data storage environments.

Together the new patents improve the system administration capabilities of IBRIX Fusion, a software-only file system based on a segmented parallel structure. The patent on which IBRIX Fusion is based, “Distributing Files Across Multiple, Permissibly Heterogeneous, Storage Devices” (No. 6,782,389), was awarded to IBRIX in 2004 and revolutionized scalable computing for both performance and large-scale file storage environments. The new patents enhance IBRIX’s IP portfolio by offering benefits inherent in a non-hierarchical approach. Unlike alternative hierarchical-based solutions which are prone to hot spots, limit scalability, and require more data hops to get to files, IBRIX Fusion has no central metadata component or distributed lock manager so all data and metadata is processed in parallel. Additionally, IBRIX software works equally well in all storage topologies including Network Attached Storage, Direct Attached Storage, Storage Area Networks, and cluster and grid computing.

“Previously the Achilles’ heel of file systems was the tendency for small errors in one area of the enterprise to shut down the system,” said Dr. Steven Orszag, IBRIX Founder and Percy F. Smith Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, Yale University. “The new shadow directory structure eliminates this issue while the allocation process improves the overall scalability of the system. We applied the storage allocation patent to real-world applications and offered FileMigrator, an advanced feature of our software, to IBRIX’s growing base of leading-brand customers earlier this year.”

Ibrix Inc.