DETAILED ACTION
Response to Arguments
1. Applicant’s arguments filed on 01/06/2026 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive for the following reasons:
Applicant argues that Tubillara does not disclose “determining, based on financial costs for performing storage management operations using storage resources in a cloud computing environment, one or more policies for management storage resources of a cloud-based storage system within the cloud computing environment”. However, Tubillara discloses (on [0063]-[0066]) actor 510 initiates a request to access cognitive AI services 514, a cloud based service, of client services 512. Before actor 510 can be provided access to cognitive AI services 514, policy enforcement point 516 verifies that actor 510 has appropriate privileges to access cognitive AI services 514. This verification process proceeds to policy decision point 522, which queries cloud databases cloud DB Dallas 534 and cloud DB London 536 through XACML engine 526, using global search and tagging supplied by GHOST 506 in GHOST global search and tagging 528, for identity access management related to the request of actor 510 and stores the queried information in DB cache 524. Policy decision point 522 verifies this request and grants actor 510 the requested access to cognitive AI services 514 of client services 512. While policy decision point 522 provides IAM services for requests to access cognitive AI services 514, it also provides IAM services for internal adoptive services 530 and external adoptive services 532. In this example, policy enforcement point 516, policy decision point 522, XACML engine 526, and cloud DB Dallas 534 and cloud DB London 536 each individually have a rate limit applied to them, respectively defining the upper limit of requests that they can process for a given unit of time. In this example, the following rate limits at the moment of the request by actor 510 are given for the following services: (1) policy decision point 522 has a rate limit of processing 100 requests for IAM services per second; (ii) cloud databases cloud DB Dallas 534 and cloud DB London 536 have rate limits of 30 requests per second; (iii) policy enforcement point 516 has a limit of 75 requests per second; and (iv) XACML engine 526 has a limit of 60 requests per second.
Tubillara discloses typically, rate limits are defined dynamically by each given service based on underlying computer hardware and current processing conditions. If hardware for a given service suffers a failure or receives improvements, the rate limit would decrease or increase, respectively. If a different client service requires a minimum amount of available processing availability and has a higher priority, the rate limit of that service for a given client service would experience a decrease. This dynamic determination of rate limits costs some amount of processing availability provided to the service, with more advanced determinations requiring additional processing availability. One embodiment of the present invention determines which service (in this example, cloud DB Dallas 534 and cloud DB London 536) has the lowest rate limit within a chain of services required to complete a request and adjusts the rate limiters of all services in the chain to match, preventing requests from near the beginning of the chain to begin, only for a service further down the chain to cause a failure as a result of reaching the service rate limiter.
In addition, Tubillara discloses Some embodiments of the present invention may include one, or more, of the following features, characteristics and/or advantages: (i) IAM has four geographical (Geo) zones; (ii) in each Geo zone they are two availability zones; (iii) each availability zone consent contains several instances of IAM services; (iv) each Geo only has a singular cloud based database; (v) requests are spread out, load balancing and active-active failover; (vi) like any cloud service, there can be a single choke point; (vii) in this example it is the cloud based database; (viii) every authorization call for all services such as writes or reads to a services that have adopted IAM, must check the access policies in the cloud based database service; (ix) IAM typically resolves these request in 30 ms; (x) Rate limiters are (or in planning) placed in front of every service throughout these call paths; (xi) there is also a rate limiter on the cloud based database; (xii) if the cloud database rate limiters started reading and triggering service outages above them it would cause a fail over; (xiii) using built in service monitors, which are typically monitoring the health of the service, to also include data on their rate limiters and win those rate limiters are triggering; (xiv) this rate limit data goes to a single service that uses an algorithm to make a decision to balance the rate limiting across all of the services in the call path to reduce incidences of service requests returning failures; (xv) these failures include http responses (too many requests) and (service outage); and/or (xvi) include other load balancers (for example, Dyn and Kubernetes) into the algorithm to automate their failover triggers.
Applicant argues that Examiner is entitled to give claim limitations their broadest reasonable interpretation in light of the specification. See MPEP 2111 [R-1 ]
Interpretation of Claims-Broadest Reasonable Interpretation
During patent examination, the pending claims must be ‘given the broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the specification’. Applicant always has the opportunity to amend the claims during prosecussion and broad interpretation by the examiner reduces the possibility that the claim, once issued, will be interpreted more broadly than is justified. In re Prater, 162 USPW 541,550-51 (CCPA 1969).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
2. The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
3. Claims 1-6, 8-20 rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Elvin D. Tubillara (US-20200052957-A1).
As per claim 1, Tubillara teaches “a method comprising”:
“determining, based on financial costs for performing storage management operations using storage resources in a cloud computing environment, one or more policies for management storage resources of a cloud-based storage system within the cloud computing environment,” ([0063]-[0064]); and
“executing, based on the one or more policies, one or more storage management operations in the cloud-based storage system,” ([0063]-[0064]).
As per claim 2, Tubillara further shows “wherein the financial costs describe at least one of a storage cost, a data ingress cost, a data egress cost, or a processing cost associated with the cloud computing environment,” ([0064]).
As per claim 3, Tubillara further shows “wherein determining the one or more policies comprises determining the one or more policies as having a minimized cost,” ([0063]).
As per claim 4, Tubillara further shows “wherein determining the one or more policies having the minimized cost is further based on one or more constraints,” ([0063]).
As per claim 5, Tubillara further shows “wherein the one or more constraints comprise a service-level agreement (SLA),” ([0063]-[0064]).
As per claim 6, Tubillara further shows “wherein determining the one or more policies comprises determining the one or more policies based on one or more factors comprising at least one of a storage reliability, a data read speed, a data write speed, or a bandwidth,” ([0065]).
As per claim 8, Tubillara further shows “wherein the one or more policies are further determined based on a predicted pattern of data access,” ([0062], [0065]).
As per claim 9, Tubillara further shows “wherein the one or more policies are further determined based on one or more features of the cloud computing environment,” ([0063], [0066]).
As per claim 10, Tubillara further shows “wherein the one or more policies comprise a garbage collection policy,” ([0066]).
As per claim 11, Tubillara further shows “wherein the one or more policies comprise a data redundancy policy,” ([0066]).
As per claim 12, Tubillara further shows “wherein the one or more policies comprise a snapshotting policy,” ([0063]).
As per claim 13, Tubillara further shows “wherein the one or more policies comprise a data replication policy,” ([0063]).
As per claim 14, Tubillara further shows “wherein the one or more policies describe conditions for executing the one or more storage management operations,” ([0063]).
As per claim 15, Tubillara further shows “wherein the one or more policies describe a type of storage used,” ([0063]).
As per claim 16, Tubillara further shows “receiving an updated financial costs,” ([0063], [0066]); and
“updating the one or more policies based on the updated financial costs,” ([0063], [0066]).
As per claim 17, Tubillara further shows “wherein the updated financial costs describes one or more updated features of the cloud computing environment,” ([0063], [0066]).
As per claim 18, Tubillara teaches “an apparatus comprising:
a memory,” (fig. 1); and
a processor, operatively coupled to the memory, configured to:
determine, based on financial costs for performing storage management operations using storage resources in a cloud computing environment, one or more policies for management storage resources of a cloud-based storage system within in the cloud computing environment,’ ([0063]-[0064]);; and
“execute, based on the one or more policies, one or more storage management operations in the cloud-based storage system,” ([0063]-[0064]).
As per claim 19, Tubillara further shows “wherein the financial costs describe at least one of a storage cost, a data ingress cost, a data egress cost, or a processing cost associated with the cloud computing environment,” ([0064]).
As per claim 20, Tubillara teaches “a non-transitory computer readable storage medium storing instructions, which when executed, cause a processor to:
determine, based on financial costs for performing storage management operations using storage resources in a cloud computing environment, one or more policies for management storage resources of a cloud-based storage system within the cloud computing environment,” ([0063]-[0064]); and
execute, based on the one or more policies, one or more storage management operations in the cloud-based storage system,” ([0063]-[0064]).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
4. 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.
5. Claim 7 is rejected under 35 U.S. C. 103(a) as being unpatentable over Elvin D. Tubillara (US-20200052957-A1) in view of Tanmay GARG (US-20240256484-A1).
As per claim 7, Tubillara teaches “wherein the determining the one or more policies”.
Tubillara doe not appear to expressly disclose “wherein the determining the one or more policies comprises determining a storage tier for storing data in the cloud-based storage system based on the financial costs”’.
GARG, however, teaches wherein the first archive storage destination is also configured in the cloud computing environment, and wherein the first archive storage destination is a lower-priced storage tier than the primary data storage ([0013]]).
Accordingly, in the same field of endeavor, (data storage management system, etc..), it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention was made to provide the method of Tubillara with the teaching of GARG by using the cost associated with storage tier in order to reduce capital expenditure and operational expenses by ensuring expensive, high-performance storage is reserved only for critical, frequency accessed data.
Allowable Subject Matter
6. Claims 1-20 would be allowable if rewritten or amended to overcome the rejections as set forth in this Office action.
Conclusion
7. The prior art made of record, listed on PTO 892 provided to Applicant is considered to have relevancy to the claimed invention. Applicant should review each identified reference carefully before responding to this office action to properly advance the case in light of the prior art.
Contact Information
8. Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to KIM T NGUYEN whose telephone number is (571)270-1757. The examiner can normally be reached on Mon-Thurs 6-4:30pm.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the
examiner’s supervisor, Kavita Stanley can be reached on (571)272-8352. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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Feb. 10, 2026
/KIM T NGUYEN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2153