US 6,449,688 · Granted 2002-09-10

How Avid Built a Storage System That Survives Failures and Never Gets Bottlenecked

Imagine a video editor pulling footage from a bunch of hard drives at once — instead of one drive doing all the work and getting overwhelmed, this patent spreads pieces of the video randomly across multiple drives so they all share the load equally. If one drive breaks, the backup copies stored elsewhere mean you don't lose anything.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a system that splits data into pieces and distributes them randomly across multiple storage devices, with redundancy information (like backup copies) also spread randomly across those same devices. What's protected here is the specific method of balancing data requests across multiple storage units and recovering lost data when a storage unit fails, plus the technique of combining small files into larger segments using a log-structured file system.

Why it matters

This patent mattered because video and media production require moving massive amounts of data reliably and quickly. By randomly distributing segments and redundancy across multiple drives, the system prevents any single drive from becoming a bottleneck, which was a critical problem in the late 1990s when Avid was pioneering nonlinear video editing. The approach also made systems more fault-tolerant — if a drive failed, the system could recover without losing work, which was essential for professional media facilities.

Real-world use

When a video editor in Avid's software opens a large project file spanning multiple hard drives, this patent's logic ensures that requests for different pieces of the video are balanced across all the drives instead of waiting in line on one drive.

Original USPTO abstract

Multiple applications request data from multiple storage units over a computer network. The data is divided into segments and each segment is distributed randomly on one of several storage units, independent of the storage units on which other segments of the media data are stored. Redundancy information corresponding to each segment also is distributed randomly over the storage units. The redundancy information for a segment may be a copy of the segment, such that each segment is stored on at least two storage units. The redundancy information also may be based on two or more segments. This random distribution of segments of data and corresponding redundancy information improves both scalability and reliability. When a storage unit fails, its load is distributed evenly over to remaining storage units and its lost data may be recovered because of the redundancy information. When an application requests a selected segment of data, the request may be processed by the storage unit with the shortest queue of requests. Random fluctuations in the load applied by multiple applications on multiple storage units are balanced nearly equally over all of the storage units. Small data files also may be stored on storage units that combine small files into larger segments of data using a log structured file system. This combination of techniques results in a system which can transfer both multiple, independent high-bandwidth streams of data and small data files in a scalable manner in both directions between multiple applications and multiple storage units.

Patent details

Publication number: US 6,449,688
Filing date: 2000-11-28
Grant date: 2002-09-10
Assignee: Avid Technology, Inc.
Inventor(s): PETERS ERIC C., RABINOWITZ STANLEY, JACOBS HERBERT R.
CPC class: H04N21/8456

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