Ex Parte Iyengar

Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences

May 24, 2010

10629284 (B.P.A.I. May. 24, 2010)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
____________

BEFORE THE BOARD OF PATENT APPEALS
AND INTERFERENCES
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Ex parte ARUN KWANGIL IYENGAR
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Appeal 2009-003338
Application 10/629,284
Technology Center 2100
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Decided: May 24, 2010
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Before JOSEPH L. DIXON, HOWARD B. BLANKENSHIP, and
THU A. DANG, Administrative Patent Judges.

BLANKENSHIP, Administrative Patent Judge.

DECISION ON APPEAL
STATEMENT OF THE CASE
This is an appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner’s final
rejection of claims 1-28, which are all the claims in the application. We
have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We reverse.
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Application 10/629,284

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Representative Claim
16. A method of maintaining a plurality of objects in a
storage transfer unit, comprising the steps of:
identifying an object position in the storage transfer unit by an
object offset in the storage transfer unit;
in response to a request to one of access and update a storage
transfer unit, copying the storage transfer unit so that different objects
are copied into different buffers;
performing at least one update to at least one object in the
storage transfer unit by modifying at least one buffer; and
after the at least one update has occurred, updating the storage
transfer unit from the at least one buffer.

Prior Art
Cabrera 5,802,599 Sep. 1, 1998
Rabii 2002/0032691 A1 Mar. 14, 2002
Garthwaite 2004/0172507 A1 Sep. 2, 2004
Chen 6,804,761 B1 Oct. 12, 2004
Mattis 6,915,307 B1 Jul. 5, 2005

Examiner’s Rejections
Claims 1-3, 9, 11, 12, 14-16, and 19-28 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103(a) as being unpatentable over Rabii and Mattis.
Claims 4-8 and 10 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over Rabii, Mattis, and Chen.
Claims 13 and 17 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over Rabii, Mattis, and Cabrera.
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Claim 18 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over Rabii, Mattis, Cabrera, and Garthwaite.

ANALYSIS
With respect to claim 16, Appellant submits that neither Rabbi nor
Mattis, nor their combination, teach or suggest the “storage transfer units”
and “object offsets” as claimed. App. Br. 12.
A “storage transfer unit” may be a sector (App. Br. 3, top). A “sector”
is defined as a disk sector, but more broadly as “any fixed unit of transfer
between two different storage media” (Spec. 6: 9-11). Further, according to
Appellant, the term “object” refers to any form of data. Id. at ll. 11-12. An
“object offset” refers to the position of an object within a sector. For
example, if an object is the 10th object in sector “x,” then its object offset is
10. Id. at 9: 25-27.
For the “storage transfer units,” the rejection submits that Rabii
discloses segments (Fig. 5) that correspond to “storage transfer units” as
claimed. See Ans. 3.
The segments (Rabii Fig. 5) are part of an individual disk partition
(¶ [0083]). Objects are stored whole and contiguously in a segment of the
disk partition (¶ [0084]). Rabii discloses that the segments are designed to
be larger than any of the objects to be stored therein, and are each of a fixed
amount of memory storage (e.g., 72 megabytes) (¶ [0039]). If we assume
that the claimed “storage transfer units” are taught by the “segments” as
described by Rabii, the reference teaches an “object offset,” as claimed. For
example, object 4 (230-4) (Fig. 5) is the 4th object in segment 2 (220-2), and
thus has an “object offset” of 4.
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However, we find no teaching or suggestion in Rabii that a segment
corresponds to or teaches a “storage transfer unit” as claimed, in view of the
definition for the term set forth in Appellant’s Specification, broad though
that definition may be. Although the segment size is fixed, the rejection
does not show where one or more segments constitute a unit of transfer
between two different storage media (e.g., between the disk and other
memory). We do not find any relevant discussion of the physical transfer of
the data in the segments being provided from or to the disk, other than that
in-memory versions of the on-disk data objects may be held in buffers (e.g.,
¶ [0104]; Fig. 10) and that the objects are stored contiguously in a segment
(¶ [0084]), such that most data objects can be read from the disk in a single
contiguous operation (¶ [0091]). The reference appears to discuss the
reading and writing of data objects within a segment (e.g., ¶ [0086]), rather
than the reading and writing of disk segments from and to other memory.
Although the Examiner suggests (Ans. 11-12) that several different
types of data transfer exchange blocks of data that meet the definition of
“storage transfer unit,” the rejection does not show that the “segments” that
hold the data objects as described by Rabii constitute such blocks of data.
The allocation of burdens requires that the USPTO produce the factual
basis for its rejection of an application under 35 U.S.C. §§ 102 and 103. In
re Piasecki, 745 F.2d 1468, 1472 (Fed. Cir. 1984) (citing In re Warner, 379
F.2d 1011, 1016 (CCPA 1967)). Because the evidentiary basis for the
rejection of claim 16 is lacking, we do not sustain the rejection of claim 16
or the claims that depend from the claim. Since all the other independent
claims on appeal (1, 25, 26, 27, and 28) operate on storage transfer units
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containing objects, which have not been shown as disclosed or suggested in
the references, we cannot sustain the rejection of any claim on appeal.

DECISION
The rejections of claims 1-28 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) are reversed.

REVERSED

msc

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