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 .
DETAILED ACTION
This Office Action is responsive to the applicants’ Amendment filed on December 30, 2025, in which claims 1-20 are pending.
Response to Amendment
Applicant has amended claims 1, 8, and 15; and claims 1-20 are pending.
Claim Objections
Claim 8 is objected to because of the following informalities:
Amended claim 8, newly recites “…determine whether stored in the on-premises storage…”, however the term “that” was not presented on the original claim.
Appropriate correction is required.
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 (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) 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, 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.
Claim(s) 1-20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Hodique et al. (US 2016/0380906A1) hereinafter “Hodique” in view of Zhang et al. (US 2023/0281338) “Zhang”.
As to claim 8, Hodique discloses a system, comprising: an on-premises server executing an on-premises gateway (Hodique [23-26], discloses an on-premise gateway and a server executing a resource scheduler);
on-premises storage collocated with the on-premises server (Hodique [23-26], discloses on-premises storage/datacenter associated with the server);
cloud storage comprising a plurality of nodegroups (Hodique [22-26], discloses a cloud computing environment/storage instance that are shared among all the tenants of cloud computing system);
a resource coordinator that identifies data in each of the plurality of nodegroups (Hodique [19-22], discloses load balancing and an orchestration component for resource coordination and resource consumption); and
a network gateway in communication with the on-premises gateway and the cloud storage (Hodique [19-20, 23-26], discloses wherein the connection between on-premise gateway 124 and cloud-side gateway for communication);
wherein the on-premises gateway is configured to receive a request for data from a user, to determine whether the data is stored in the on-premises storage or in the cloud storage, and to route the request to the network gateway in response to determining that the data is stored in cloud storage (Hodique [17-20, 23-26], discloses storage resources on premises and could environment for storing data, however is silent on responding to a data request);
However, Zhang discloses a system for data access gateway for security and privacy wherein user requested data is routed specifically to a network gateway (Zhang [21-22, 71-75]);
routing, by the on-premises gateway, the request to a network gateway
wherein the network gateway is configured to retrieve an identification of one of the nodegroups for the request from the resource coordinator, to receive the data from the identified nodegroup, and to provide the data to the on-premises gateway, the data from the network gateway (Zhang [21-22, 72-76], discloses routing the query request to specific gateway based on the information associated with at least one of the query request or first user; and routing the request from the specific gateway to an internal data center platform); and
wherein the on-premises gateway is further configured to return the data to the user via the on-premises server (Zhang [21-22, 44-47], discloses wherein the request is provided to a load balancer/gateway agent, where the load balancer/gateway agent validates and audit a data access schema prior to submitting the request to a production data center where the requested data is returned).
Hodique and Zhang are analogous art because they are from the same field of endeavor, namely, systems and methods of data access via a network gateway. before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, having the teachings of Hodique and Zhang before him or her, to modify the hybrid could resource access system of Hodique to include the gateway agent and load balancer of Zhang with reasonable expectation that this would result in a system that is able to process a user’s request for data, by retrieving the data and routing it via the specified gateway. This method of improving the cloud resource access system of Hodique was well within the ordinary ability of one of ordinary skill in the art based on the teachings of Zhang. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one having ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teachings of Hodique with Zhang to obtain the invention as specified in claim 1 to determine the location of the data based on the user’s request.
As to claim 9, Hodique-Zhang discloses the system of claim 8, further comprising: a plurality of network gateways (Hodique [16, 22-24], discloses network gateways); and a network load balancer (Hodique [21-24], discloses load balancing):
wherein the on-premises gateway is further configured to route the request to the network load balancer, and the network load balancer is configured to select one of the network gateways out of a plurality of network gateways (Zhang [21-22, 31, 44], discloses wherein the load balancer/gateway agent is able of route the requested data via access gateway). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Hodique and Zhang as in claim 8 above.
As to claim 10, Hodique-Zhang discloses the system of claim 9, wherein the network gateway is selected based on workload or latency (Zhang [21-24], discloses selecting a gateway agent to process the data request via load balancer). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Hodique and Zhang as in claim 9 above.
As to claim 11, Hodique-Zhang discloses the system of claim 8, wherein the resource coordinator stores a mapping of each of the nodegroups to a type of data stored in each nodegroup (Hodique [15-19], discloses wherein the resources of cloud computing system is able to coordinate/manage storage of data locations/mapping in each cloud computing environment). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Hodique and Zhang as in claim 8 above.
As to claim 12, Hodique-Zhang discloses the system of claim 8, wherein the resource coordinator stores a mapping of nodegroups to a line of business for each nodegroup (Hodique [17-19, 21-24], discloses wherein the resources of cloud computing system is able to coordinate/manage storage of data locations/mapping in each cloud computing environment, including storing resources by category or organization, etc.). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Hodique and Zhang as in claim 8 above.
As to claim 13, Hodique-Zhang discloses the system of claim 8, wherein the nodegroup comprises real-time data storage, intraday data storage, and historical data storage, and the data is stored in the real-time data storage, intraday data storage, and historical data storage according to a configurable time setting (Hodique [32-36], discloses wherein the resource scheduler can take various actions depending on the time, duration, constraints, or queue for processing storage requests, or is capable of configuring instructions over a period of time or threshold with a queue). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Hodique and Zhang as in claim 8 above.
As to claim 14, Hodique-Zhang discloses the system of claim 8, further comprising: an aggregator that is configured to aggregate the data from the identified nodegroup before it is received by the network gateway (Hodique [18-22], discloses wherein the cloud computing environment retrieves/aggregates the data associated with the request before arriving to the network gateway). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Hodique and Zhang as in claim 8 above.
Claims 1-7, and 15-20 are corresponding method and non-transitory computer readable storage medium claims that recite similar limitations as of claims 8-14 and do not contain any additional features with respect to novelty and/or inventive steps; therefore, they are rejected under the same rationale.
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. See Form 892.
Response to Arguments
Applicant's remarks, see page 8, filed December 30, 2025, with respect to objection to the abstract have been fully considered and are persuasive. The objection as set forth in the previous Office Action has been withdrawn.
Applicant's arguments filed on December 30, 2025 have been considered, However, upon further consideration, a new ground(s) of rejection is made in view of Hodique and Zhang.
Conclusion
The rejections are based upon the broadest reasonable interpretation of the claims. Applicant is advised that the specified citations of the relied upon prior art, in the above rejections, are only representative of the teachings of the prior art, and that any other supportive sections within the entirety of the reference (including any figures, incorporation by references, claims and/or priority documents) is implied as being applied to teach the scope of the claims.
Applicant may not introduce any new matter to the claims or to the specification. For any subsequent response that contains new/amended claims, Applicant is required to cite its corresponding support in the specification. (See MPEP chapter 2163.03 section (I.) and chapter 2163.04 section (I.) and chapter 2163.06)
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection; accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any extension fee pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Razu Miah whose telephone number is (571)270-5433. The examiner can normally be reached M-F, 9-5 EST.
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/RAZU A MIAH/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2441