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 .
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant’s submission filed on 8/19/2026 has been entered.
Claims 1-2, 4, 6-11, 13-17 and 19-20 are presented for examination. Claims 1, 4, 9 and 16 have been amended.
Applicant’s amendments to the claims have overcome 112 rejection previously set forth in the Final Office Action mailed 5/22/2026.
Examiner Notes
Examiner cites particular columns, paragraphs, figures and line numbers in the references as applied to the claims below for the convenience of the applicant. Although the specified citations are representative of the teachings in the art and are applied to the specific limitations within the individual claim, other passages and figures may apply as well. It is respectfully requested that, in preparing responses, the applicant fully consider the references in entirely as potentially teaching all or part of the claimed invention, as well as the context of the passage as taught by the prior art or disclosed by the examiner.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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 of this title, 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, 4, 6-7, 9, 13-14, 16 and 19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Bhatia et al. (US 20160321197 A1, hereafter Bhatia) in view of Faasse et al. (US 20240061964 A1, hereafter Faasse), Haggart et al. (US 20210203547 A1, hereafter Haggart), Badic et al. (US 20220360645 A1, hereafter Badic) and Edtanous et al. (title: D-Bus configurable sensor scanning applications-NPL from github.com captured by web.archive.org at 7/14/2022, hereafter Edtanous).
Regarding to claim 1, Bhatia discloses: An Information Handling System (IHS) (see Fig. 1, [0003], [0059] and [0066]; “The system 100 is capable of providing BMC functionalities in a plurality of split BMC stacks, with one subset of the BMC functionalities including time critical functions, and the other subset of the BMC functionalities including the rest of the non-critical functions” and “The first management device 120 is the management device that includes one subset of the BMC functionalities to control time critical functionalities”) comprising:
a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) that is configured to execute a plurality of BMC service objects for managing the operation of the IHS (see Fig. 1, [0003], [0066]; “The system 100 is capable of providing BMC functionalities in a plurality of split BMC stacks, with one subset of the BMC functionalities including time critical functions, and the other subset of the BMC functionalities including the rest of the non-critical functions” and “The first management device 120 is the management device that includes one subset of the BMC functionalities to control time critical functionalities”);
at least one processor; and at least one memory coupled to the at least one processor, the at least one memory having program instructions stored thereon that, upon execution by the at least one processor, cause the IHS to (see Fig. 1, [0066]-[0067]; “the first management device 120 has a processor 122, a memory 124, a non-volatile memory 126”):
execute a first subset of the plurality of BMC service objects on the BMC (see [0059] and [0066]; “providing BMC functionalities in a plurality of split BMC stacks, with one subset of the BMC functionalities including time critical functions” and “The first management device 120 is the management device that includes one subset of the BMC functionalities to control time critical functionalities”. Also see [0058]; “the D-IPMI system may include multiple management devices (such as multiple computer chips), in which one management devices maintains a certain subset of the BMC functionalities, and a different subset of the BMC functionalities may be offloaded to another management device”); and
execute a second subset of the plurality of BMC service objects on an external computing environment in communication with the BMC (see [0059] and [0072]; “providing BMC functionalities in a plurality of split BMC stacks … and the other subset of the BMC functionalities including the rest of the non-critical functions” and “The second management device 130 is the management device that includes the other subset of the BMC functionalities to control non-critical functionalities”. Also see [0058]; “the D-IPMI system may include multiple management devices (such as multiple computer chips), in which one management devices maintains a certain subset of the BMC functionalities, and a different subset of the BMC functionalities may be offloaded to another management device”. Furthermore, see [0078] and [0080]; “the firmware 138 may perform the internal communication with the first management device 120 through the stack interface 160 to request the required system information of the computing device 110 from the first management device 120 … the firmware 128 of the first management device 120 performs the time-critical functions to request the system information of the computing device 110”);
Bhatia does not disclose:
the plurality of BMC service objects is a plurality of Desktop Bus (D-Bus) objects;
execute a second subset of the plurality of D-Bus objects on a cloud computing environment;
determine, for each D-Bus object, whether to execute the D-Bus object on the cloud environment or the BMC according to a processing load level incurred by the D-Bus object; and
cause the D-Bus object to be executed on either of the cloud computing environment or the BMC according to the determination; and
migrating the D-Bus object between execution on the cloud computing environment or the BMC according to hysteresis applied to the processing load level.
However, Faasse discloses: execute offloaded BMC service objects on a cloud computing environment (see [0038]-[0040]; “The Net-SCM 102 is a device that replaces a BMC and associated circuitry or a DC-SCM, but offloads BMC functionality to another server 136 so that changes to accommodate new or different functionality of a BMC/DC-SCM are able to be implemented through software changes”. Also see [0047]; “the management application 134 and server 136 are in a cloud computing environment”).
It would have been obvious to one with ordinary skill, in the art before the effective filing date of the claim invention, to modify the processes of offloading BMC service objects from a local device to a remote device of same distributed system from Bhatia by including the process of offloading BMC service objects from a local device to a remote device of a cloud environment from Faasse, since cloud computing environment is well-known and understood type of scalable and elastic pool of resources.
In addition, Haggart discloses: determine, for each service object, whether to execute the service object on the cloud environment or the local environment according to a processing load level incurred by the service object; and cause the service object to be executed on either of the cloud computing environment or the local environment according to the determination (see [0107], [0113] and [0197]-[0198]; “The workload profiling includes CPU, memory, IO, and network utilization for all on-premises workloads that have been targeted for migration to the cloud” and “cloud migration objectives may include one or more choices of CSP or … a required level of performance for some or all applications or workloads that need to be migrated to the cloud infrastructure” and “generates utilization levels matching, as much as possible, the on-premises utilization levels. The on-premise utilization levels of synthetic workloads are the reference that is compared to the representative synthetic workload utilization levels in the cloud … which workloads of the enterprise network to migrate to a CSP, and which CSP may be best suited for the customer's needs. The customer may utilize this information to determine which CSP to migrate their on-premises infrastructure to and which CSP to choose”).
It would have been obvious to one with ordinary skill, in the art before the effective filing date of the claim invention, to modify the policy of offloading a subset of BMC functions to cloud computing environment from the combination of Bhatia and Faasse by including policy of migrating certain workloads to cloud environment based on resource utilization level of the workloads from Haggart, since it would provide a mechanism to ensure execution performance of the workloads (see [0107] and [0113] from Haggart).
In addition, Badic discloses: migrating the service object between execution on the cloud computing environment or the local node that was used to execute the service object according to hysteresis applied to the processing load level (see [0012]-[0013] and [0150]-[0151]; “a utility function, wherein the utility function is based on one or more of the application latency or energy consumption associated with offloading the task and one or more of the application latency or energy consumption associated with performing the task locally on the UE” and “the UE may use a first threshold value in determining whether to offload a task and use a second different threshold in determining whether to return an offloaded task back to the UE for local execution. This hysteresis may prevent the task from undesirably ping-ponging back and forth between remote and local execution”. Also see [0003]-[0004]; “simply “Edge Computing.” refers to an evolution of cloud computing”).
It would have been obvious to one with ordinary skill, in the art before the effective filing date of the claim invention, to modify the offloading generic BMC service objects to cloud environment from local BMC environment from the combination of Bhatia, Faasse and Haggart by including two different threshold values to determine offloading a task from local execution to cloud execution and migrating the offloaded task back to local execution respectively from Badic, since it would provide a mechanism that prevents “the task from undesirably ping-ponging back and forth between remote and local execution” (see [0013] from Badic).
In addition, Edtanous discloses: a plulriaty of Desktop Bus (D-Bus) objects is well-known and understood BMC service objects executed at BMC environment (see dbus-sensors, key features and dbus interfaces sections at page 2; “dbus-sensors is a collection of sensor applications that provide the xyz.openbmc_project.Sensor collection of interfaces” and “A typical dbus-sensors object support the following dbus interfaces”. Note: OpenBMC is A Linux Foundation Project open-source Baseboard Management Controllers (BMC) Firmware Stack).
It would have been obvious to one with ordinary skill, in the art before the effective filing date of the claim invention, to modify the generic BMC service objects to be executed on cloud environment or local BMC environment from the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart and Badic by including D-Bus objects executed at OpenBMC environment from Edtanous, and thus the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic and Edtanous would disclose the missing limitations from Bhatia, since it is well-known and understood to running certain particular type of service object at a same computing environment that is used to run generic type of service object.
Regarding to Claim 4, the rejection of Claim 1 is incorporated and further the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic and Edtanous discloses: wherein the instructions, upon execution, cause the IHS to update one of the plurality of D-Bus objects on the cloud computing environment while the BMC remains operational (see [0040] and [0063] from Faasse; “The Net-SCM 102 … offloads BMC functionality to another server 136 so that changes to accommodate new or different functionality of a BMC/DC-SCM are able to be implemented through software changes” and “Having the BIOS and BMC images on or accessible to the management application 134 allows for simple updates by just accessing a different image, overwriting an image, etc”. . Also see dbus-sensors, key features and dbus interfaces sections at page 2 from Edtanous; “dbus-sensors is a collection of sensor applications that provide the xyz.openbmc_project.Sensor collection of interfaces”. Note: at the combination system, the BMC service objects determined to offload to cloud or not can include plurality of D-Bus service objects).
Regarding to Claim 6, the rejection of Claim 1 is incorporated and further the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic and Edtanous discloses: wherein the instructions, upon execution, cause the IHS to determine, for each D-Bus object, whether to execute the D-Bus object on the cloud computing environment or the BMC according to a security sensitivity level required by the D-Bus object (see [0113] and [0192]-[0194] from Haggart; “cloud migration objectives may include one or more choices of CSP or a required level of security for some or all of the applications or workloads that need to be migrated to a cloud infrastructure”. Also see dbus-sensors, key features and dbus interfaces sections at page 2 from Edtanous; “dbus-sensors is a collection of sensor applications that provide the xyz.openbmc_project.Sensor collection of interfaces”. Note: at the combination system, the BMC service objects determined to offload to cloud or not can include plurality of D-Bus service objects).
Regarding to Claim 7, the rejection of Claim 1 is incorporated and further the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic and Edtanous discloses: wherein the instructions, upon execution, cause the IHS to determine, for each D-Bus object, whether to execute the D-Bus object on the cloud computing environment or the BMC according to how critical the D-Bus object is to the operation of the IHS (see [0018]-[0022] from Bhatia; “performing, by the first IPMI related computer executable code executed at the first processor of the first management device, a plurality of time critical functions related to the computing device” and “performing, by the second IPMI related computer executable code executed at the second processor of the at least one second management device, a plurality of non-critical functions related to the computing device”. Also see dbus-sensors, key features and dbus interfaces sections at page 2 from Edtanous; “dbus-sensors is a collection of sensor applications that provide the xyz.openbmc_project.Sensor collection of interfaces”. Note: at the combination system, the BMC service objects determined to offload to cloud or not can include plurality of D-Bus service objects).
Regarding to Claim 9, Claim 9 is a method claim corresponds to system Claim 1 and is rejected for the same reason set forth in the rejection of Claim 1 above.
Regarding to Claim 13, Claim 13 is a method claim corresponds to system Claim 6 and is rejected for the same reason set forth in the rejection of Claim 6 above.
Regarding to Claim 14, Claim 14 is a method claim corresponds to system Claim 7 and is rejected for the same reason set forth in the rejection of Claim 7 above.
Regarding to Claim 16, Claim 16 is a product claim corresponds to system Claim 1 and is rejected for the same reason set forth in the rejection of Claim 1 above.
Regarding to Claim 19, Claim 19 is a product claim corresponds to system Claim 4 and is rejected for the same reason set forth in the rejection of Claim 4 above.
Claims 2, 10-11 and 17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Bhatia et al. (US 20160321197 A1, hereafter Bhatia) in view of Faasse et al. (US 20240061964 A1, hereafter Faasse), Haggart et al. (US 20210203547 A1, hereafter Haggart), Badic et al. (US 20220360645 A1, hereafter Badic) and Edtanous et al. (title: D-Bus configurable sensor scanning applications-NPL from github.com captured by web.archive.org at 7/14/2022, hereafter Edtanous) and further in view of Zhang et al. (US 20250227160 A1, hereafter Zhang).
Regarding to Claim 2, the rejection of Claim 1 is incorporated and further the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic and Edtanous discloses: wherein the instructions, upon execution, cause the plurality of D-Bus objects executed on the cloud computing environment to communicate with the BMC using a communication interface (see [0078], [0080] from Bhatia and [0067] from Faasse; “the firmware 138 may perform the internal communication with the first management device 120 through the stack interface 160 to request the required system information of the computing device 110 from the first management device 120 … the firmware 128 of the first management device 120 performs the time-critical functions to request the system information of the computing device 110” and “the Net-SCM 102 transmits the management signals 312 to the management application 134 using a security protocol, such as encryption, tunneling, or other security mechanism that ensures security of the transmitted management signals 312”. Note: at the combination system, the external device to execute the offloaded subset of BMC services is an external device at cloud environment. Also see dbus-sensors, key features and dbus interfaces sections at page 2 from Edtanous; “dbus-sensors is a collection of sensor applications that provide the xyz.openbmc_project.Sensor collection of interfaces”. Note: at the combination system, the BMC service objects determined to offload to cloud or not can include plurality of D-Bus service objects).
The combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic and Edtanous does not disclose: the communication interface is a Secure Shell (SHH) tunnel.
However, Zhang discloses: the service objects executed on the cloud service to communicate with the BMC using a Secure Shell (SHH) tunnel (see [0032] and [0049]; “the edge server 106 to establish a tunnel connection 134 with the cloud server 124 where the tunnel connection uses a Secure Shell (“SSH”) protocol. SSH is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. In the system 100 of FIG. 1A, the tunnel connection 134 is depicted with an SSH 114 in the BMC 104 and an SSH 132 in the cloud server 124. SSH tunnel connection 134 and tunnel connection 134 are used interchangeably herein”).
It would have been obvious to one with ordinary skill, in the art before the effective filing date of the claim invention, to modify the tunneling communication interface between external device on the cloud and BMC of the local device from the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic and Edtanous by including SSH communication protocol between cloud and BMC from Zhang, and thus the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic, Edtanous and Zhang would disclose the missing limitations from the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic and Edtanous, since “SSH is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network”, i.e., SSH is a well-known and understood type of security protocol (see [0049] from Zhang).
Regarding to Claim 10, Claim 10 is a method claim corresponds to system Claim 2 and is rejected for the same reason set forth in the rejection of Claim 2 above.
Regarding to Claim 11, the rejection of Claim 10 is incorporated and further the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic, Edtanous and Zhang discloses: updating one of the plurality of D-Bus object on the cloud computing environment while the BMC remains operational (see [0040] and [0063] from Faasse; “The Net-SCM 102 … offloads BMC functionality to another server 136 so that changes to accommodate new or different functionality of a BMC/DC-SCM are able to be implemented through software changes” and “Having the BIOS and BMC images on or accessible to the management application 134 allows for simple updates by just accessing a different image, overwriting an image, etc”. Also see dbus-sensors, key features and dbus interfaces sections at page 2 from Edtanous; “dbus-sensors is a collection of sensor applications that provide the xyz.openbmc_project.Sensor collection of interfaces”. Note: at the combination system, the BMC service objects determined to offload to cloud or not can include plurality of D-Bus service objects).
Regarding to Claim 17, Claim 17 is a product claim corresponds to system Claim 2 and is rejected for the same reason set forth in the rejection of Claim 2 above.
Claims 8, 15 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Bhatia et al. (US 20160321197 A1, hereafter Bhatia) in view of Faasse et al. (US 20240061964 A1, hereafter Faasse), Haggart et al. (US 20210203547 A1, hereafter Haggart), Badic et al. (US 20220360645 A1, hereafter Badic) and Edtanous et al. (title: D-Bus configurable sensor scanning applications-NPL from github.com captured by web.archive.org at 7/14/2022, hereafter Edtanous) and further in view of Zhang et al. (US 11868793 B2, hereafter Zhang).
Regarding to Claim 8, the rejection of Claim 1 is incorporated, the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic and Edtanous does not disclose: wherein the instructions, upon execution, cause the IHS to receive user input for determining whether the plurality of D-Bus objects are executed in the cloud computing environment or the BMC.
However, Zhang discloses: wherein the instructions, upon execution, cause the IHS to receive user input for determining whether the plurality of service objects are executed in the cloud computing environment or the IHS (see claim 1; “receiving, from a tenant of a first host machine and a second host machine of a cloud computer service, preferences for scheduling a cloud update of at least one of the first host machine or the second host machine, the first host machine and the second host machine each hosting one or more virtual machines of the tenant, the preferences specifying whether the tenant will accept migration of an instance of the one or more virtual machines to a different host machine”).
It would have been obvious to one with ordinary skill, in the art before the effective filing date of the claim invention, to modify the policy of offloading a subset of BMC functions to cloud computing environment from the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic and Edtanous by including policy of migrating certain workloads to another device based on user’s preferences from Zhang, and thus the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic, Edtanous and Zhang would disclose the missing limitations from the combination of Bhatia, Faasse, Haggart, Badic and Edtanous, since it would provide a mechanism to executing workloads based on tenant or user’s needs (see claim 1 from Zhang).
Regarding to Claim 15, Claim 15 is a method claim corresponds to system Claim 8 and is rejected for the same reason set forth in the rejection of Claim 8 above.
Regarding to Claim 20, Claim 20 is a product claim corresponds to system Claim 8 and is rejected for the same reason set forth in the rejection of Claim 8 above.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments, filed 7/17/2026, with respect to rejections of 1-2, 4, 6-11, 13-17 and 19-20 under 35 U.S.C. 103 have been full considered. New grounds of rejections are made based on the amended limitations from the independent claims.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Gorbatov et al. (US 20140189301 A1) discloses: workload migration process can be configured with hysteresis, i.e., the workload migrated to target location can be migrated back to source location based on a different threshold (see [0060]).
Dong et al. (US 20250123901 A1) discloses: workload migration process can be roll back or revoked until the workload of source node is less than or equal to workload of the destination node (see [0036]).
Wu et al. (US 20240031429 A1) discloses: if the average resource utilization of the server nodes in the secondary cluster is greater than or equal to the maximum threshold, the server nodes in the idle cluster pool are migrated to the secondary cluster, or, if the average utilization of server nodes in secondary cluster is less than the minimum threshold, load balancing of server nodes in secondary cluster is achieved by migrating the server nodes in the secondary cluster to the idle cluster pool (see [0024]).
Peng (US 20240272942 A1) discloses: the migrated process at destination CPU can be migrated back to source CPU in response to the load of the source CPU is lower than second threshold (see [0114]).
Varshaneya et al. (US 20060280505 A1) discloses: The first and second predetermined thresholds at the Tag can be selected to allow for some level of hysteresis in the control module 240 such that the optical transmitter 120 does not rapidly alternate between optical sources (see [0058]).
Sankaran et al. (US 20190347125 A1) discloses: the heterogeneous scheduler implements hysteresis to avoid too-frequent migrations (e.g., by setting threshold values for the one or more criteria referenced above, or a subset of the same) (see [0231]).
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to ZHI CHEN whose telephone number is (571)272-0805. The examiner can normally be reached on M-F from 9:30AM to 5:30PM.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, April Y Blair can be reached on 571-270-1014. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/Zhi Chen/
Patent Examiner, AU2196
/APRIL Y BLAIR/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2196
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