Patent · US Expired

Extensible computing system

US6779016B1 · kind B1 · utility

210Cited by
22References
49Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateFeb 11, 2000
Grant dateAug 17, 2004
Priority date
Expiry dateFeb 11, 2020

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
  • CPC primaryH04L67/1029
  • WIPO fieldDigital communication
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

Methods and apparatus providing a dynamically sized, highly scalable and available server farm are disclosed. A Virtual Server Farm (VSF) is created out of a wide scale computing fabric (“Computing Grid”) which is physically constructed once and then logically divided up into VSFs for various organizations on demand. Each organization retains independent administrative control of a VSF. A VSF is dynamically firewalled within the Computing Grid. A allocation and control of the elements in the VSF is performed by a Control Plane connected to all computing, networking, and storage elements in the computing grid through special control ports. The internal topology of each VSF is under control of the Control Plane. No physical rewiring is necessary in order to construct VSFs in many different configurations, including single-tier Web server or multi-tier Web-server, application server, database server configurations. Each tier of a multi-tier VSF (e.g. Web server tier, application server tier, database server tier, etc) can be dynamically sized based on the load on the servers in that particular tier. Storage devices may include a plurality of pre-defined logical blueprints …

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.