Patents by Inventor Howard Alt

Howard Alt has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Augmenting volume management of information storage devices to handle direct access to storage devices
    Patent number: 5675781
    Abstract: A computing system operates a volume management system to manage accesses to the storage of information and provides to the users of the volume management system parallel process paths for accessing a storage device is as an access volume operation or as an access device operation. Further the volume management system prevents the two parallel logical operations from conflicting with each other by performing an open volume operation and an open device operation. These operations indirectly communicate by setting and clearing characteristics in stored volume data characteristics that they share for each device being accessed. The characteristics include an open count to track the open status of a device and an exclusive flag to track whether the storage device has been opened exclusively by either the open volume or the open device operation request from a user.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 6, 1995
    Date of Patent: October 7, 1997
    Assignee: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
    Inventors: William L. Duncan, Howard Alt