Abstract: A mechanism is provided that aggregates data in a way that permits data to be deleted efficiently, while minimizing the overhead necessary to support bulk deletion of data. A request is received for automatic deletion of segments in a container and a waterline is determined for the container. A determination is made if at least one segment in the container falls below the waterline. Finally, in response to one segment falling below the waterline, the segment from the container is deleted. Each object has an associated creation time, initial retention value, and retention decay curve (also known as a retention curve). At any point, based on these values and the current time, the object's current retention value may be computed. The container system continually maintains a time-varying waterline: at any point, objects with a retention value below the waterline may be deleted.

Abstract: A system and method for using a conventional, unmodified operating system that routinely issues disk I/O requests in a diskless network computer. An adapter receives the disk I/O requests and translates them to network I/O requests, transparently to the CPU. The requests are satisfied using the network. In this way, the operating system need not be modified to issue network calls instead of disk requests.

Abstract: A system for authentication to support secure data transfer includes a protocol wherein a certificate payload, an ID payload, and a signature payload all respectively contain at least two certificates, IDs, and signatures, concatenated together. The certificates are generated by different certificate authorities (CA) that have no trust relationship with each other. One certificate can be granted to a person and another to a particular host computer intended to be used by the person, so that for secure data transfer to take place, both a certified user and a certified host computer must be involved.

Abstract: A method and system for managing workloads in an autonomic computer system based on feedback and feed-forward performance information. The method establishes a performance objective for the system, determines a measure of instantaneous demand in the system, continuously tracks the objective with respect to the measure, forecast a future demand based on an autoregressive time series of the system, and adjusts the control parameters of the system to meet the objective. The performance objective is associated with a confidence level and typically includes a desired system response time. The tracking step includes obtaining performance data on the system and storing the performance data in a persistent data store. The demand forecasting uses a Spectral Forecasting procedure to forecast a future workload from a present workload.

Abstract: The invention defines a system and method for broadcasting high quality, digitally encoded music and/or video (hereinafter called “content”) such that the content, once received, cannot be further redistributed in digital form. The content may be played as received on a receiving means (hereinafter called a “receiver”) or may be recorded digitally for later play-back on the same receiver. In one embodiment incorporating transportable ‘smart tokens’, the content may later be played back on a different receiver. The invention is directed primarily to preventing the piracy of content broadcast in support of services such as digital radio or television. In one preferred embodiment the invention may also be used to prevent piracy in the retail distribution of digital content.

Abstract: A hot pluggable system includes an interlock between a component fail detect module and a component lock mechanism, such that the component is locked in place when it operates properly and is automatically released to permit a person to remove the component from the system when the component fails. In this way, the risk of human errors in removing the wrong component is reduced.

Abstract: A system and method for using a conventional, unmodified operating system that routinely issues disk I/O requests in a diskless network computer. An adapter receives the disk I/O requests and translates them to network I/O requests, transparently to the CPU. The requests are satisfied using the network. In this way, the operating system need not be modified to issue network calls instead of disk requests.

Abstract: A system for ensuring high reliability in a block service disk array system while promoting high performance by logically writing all changes to strides on the array while physically writing ahead to a log only a subset of the changes. Specifically, for changes of only a strip or so, the changes are written to a log, along with a commit record, and then written to disk, later deleting the changes from the log. In contrast, for relatively larger changes, i.e., for an entire (or nearly entire) stride, the old stride is not overwritten by the new, but rather is written to a new location on the disk, with the new and old locations and a commit record (but not the new stride itself) being logged and with the entries for the locations in the stride mapping table swapped with each other. In an alternate embodiment, blocks can be written to temporary locations in a RAID-1 area and lazily moved to home locations in a RAID-5 area of an array of disks.

Abstract: A system for authentication to support secure data transfer includes a protocol wherein a certificate payload, an ID payload, and a signature payload all respectively contain at least two certificates, IDs, and signatures, concatenated together. The certificates are generated by different certificate authorities (CA) that have no trust relationship with each other. One certificate can be granted to a person and another to a particular host computer intended to be used by the person, so that for secure data transfer to take place, both a certified user and a certified host computer must be involved.