DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
This office action is in response to the Appeal brief filed on March 30, 2026, in which claims 6, 8, 13 and 15 were cancelled and claims 1-5, 7, 9-12, 14 and 16-20 are presented for further examination.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments with respect to claims 1-5, 7, 9-12, 14 and 16-20 have been considered but are moot because the new ground of rejection does not rely on any reference applied in the prior rejection of record for any teaching or matter specifically challenged in the argument set forth in the Appeal Brief.
Remark
Note that the claim invention is involved in grouping objects by shared attributes and dynamically choosing how to distribute each group across storage clusters based on optimization criteria. If deduplication is favored, the objects are stored in one cluster; if faster restore is needed, the objects are spread across multiple clusters for parallel backup/restore handling. A cloud-based management service then causes the selected mode to be implemented and keeps track of the storage locations.
Applicant should duly note that the method claims include conditional steps.
The precedential PTAB decision (Ex Parte Schulhauser) clarified that conditional limitations in method claims generally carry no patentable weight. Ex Parte Schulhauser involved an appeal of a patent application for implantable medical devices for monitoring cardiac conditions, where the claims included conditional steps—for example, performing certain monitoring actions only if specific physiological criteria were met. The PTAB reviewed claims 1 and 11, representing method and system claims, respectively, and addressed whether conditional language in these claims affected patentability. The PTAB held that conditional steps in method claims do not carry patentable weight. This means that if a step is performed only when a condition is met, an anticipatory reference or combination of references need only disclose one of the conditional paths to render the claim obvious. For example, in Schulhauser, a method claim had two mutually exclusive paths: one including steps A, B, C, and the other including steps A, B, D-H. The Board determined that the broadest reasonable interpretation of the claim could cover only the first path, making it obvious over prior art that disclosed steps 1–3
Therefore, based on the precedential PTAB decision, the method claims 1-5, 7, 9-12, 14 and 16-18 include conditional limitations that carry no patentable weight. A new ground of rejection is as follow.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 1-5, 7, 9-12, 14 and 16-18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Filippi et al., (hereinafter “Filippi”) US 10,977,316 in view Ge et al., (hereinafter “Ge”) CN-115113800.
As to claim 1, Filippi discloses a method comprising:
identifying a plurality of objects sharing one or more common attributes (see fig.2, col.9, line 48-col.10, line 67, all the data that are collected from a plurality of sources and stored together according to the data type, which the forwarders that receive data from a variety of input data sources) ;
determining a storage distribution mode for the plurality of objects sharing the one or more common attributes based at least in part on one or more optimization criteria, wherein the one or more optimization criteria are based on one or more of: an expected deduplication efficiency, a predicted deduplication efficiency, a target deduplication ratio, a recovery time objective, a recovery point objective, or a cluster performance metric (see fig.2 and col25, lines 10-25, the forwarders would identify which indexers would receive data collected from a data source based on cluster-related performance metrics); and
in response to determining the storage distribution mode is a restore distribution mode, implementing the restore distribution mode by providing to a first storage cluster a first command to back up a first subset of the plurality of objects and providing to a second storage cluster a second command to back up a second subset of the plurality of objects, wherein the first storage cluster and the second storage cluster are different clusters (see fig.2, in response to identify the which indexer would receive the data collected from the source, forward the data to the appropriate indexers).
Ge, see abstract, receives a cluster management request from the corresponding management node, the cluster management request is used for requesting to perform management operation for the storage cluster; based on the cluster management request, determining the target storage cluster in the plurality of storage clusters; sending the operation request to the target storage cluster, to request to perform the management operation storage cluster.
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one having ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the system of Filippi to manage a multi-cluster by using a computing device based on distributed storage system, disclosed by the system of Ge, in order to keep the storage clusters transparent to a user, thus avoiding presence of storage clusters for user operation trouble, and hence improving stability and reliability of the storage service.
The combination of Filippi and Ge receives a data protection specification, wherein the data protection specification identifies a set of objects associated with a source system that are to be protected; identifying, from among the set of objects associated with the source system, the plurality of objects sharing one or more common attributes, wherein the common attributes comprise one or more of a source system, an object type, a size, an application, a retention policy, a creation date, a tag, a permissions group, a recovery time objective, a label, a prefix, an author, a geolocation, or a creator, wherein the storage distribution mode for the plurality of objects sharing the one or more common attributes is determined using one or more machine learning models, wherein a deduplication distribution mode is determined for the plurality of objects sharing the one or more common attributes based on a determination that the plurality of objects sharing the one or more common attributes are expected to have an expected deduplication ratio that is above a deduplication ratio threshold, wherein in response to determining the storage distribution mode is the deduplication distribution mode, implementing the deduplication distribution mode by providing to the first storage cluster a command to back up the plurality of objects sharing the one or more common attributes, wherein in response to receiving the command to back up the plurality of objects sharing the one or more common attributes, the first storage cluster requests data associated with the plurality of objects sharing the one or more common attributes from a source system, wherein the first storage cluster receives and stores the data associated with the plurality of objects sharing the one or more common attributes from the source system, wherein the one or more optimization criteria are based on restore distribution mode is determined for the plurality of objects sharing the one or more common attributes in response to a determination that a particular the recovery time objective is to be satisfied for the plurality of objects sharing the one or more common attributes, wherein in response to receiving the first command to back up the first subset of the plurality of objects, the first storage cluster requests data associated with the first subset of the plurality of objects from a source system, and wherein in response to receiving the second command to back up the second subset of the plurality of objects sharing one or more common attributes, the second storage cluster requests data associated with the second subset of the plurality of objects from the source system, wherein the first storage cluster stores the data associated with the first subset of the plurality of objects from the source system, and wherein the second storage cluster stores the data associated with the second subset of the plurality of objects from the source system; and updates a map that indicates a storage location for the plurality of objects sharing the one or more common attributes.
Claim 20 is allowed in light of the prior art made of record. None of the prior art of record, singular and any order combination, provides to a first storage cluster a first command to back up a first subset of the plurality of objects and provides to a second storage cluster a second command to back up a second subset of the plurality of objects, wherein the first storage cluster and the second storage cluster are different clusters. This claimed features render claim 20 allow.
Conclusion
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/JEAN M CORRIELUS/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2159 June 3, 2026
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