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and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114.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 6/11/2026 has been entered.
Response to Amendment
The amendments filed 6/11/2026 have been accepted. Claims 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, and 10 are still pending. Claims 1, 5, and 9 are amended. Claims 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, and 12 have been canceled. Applicant’s amendments to the abstract and claims have overcome each and every objection, 112, and 102 rejection previously set forth in the Final Office Action mailed 3/11/2026.
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, 2, 5, 6, 9, and 10 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Yang et al., SPDK: A development kit to build high performance storage applications, IEEE 9th International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, 2017 (hereafter referred to as Yang) in view of Montazeri et al. (US PGPub 2021/0311620, hereafter referred to as Montazeri).
Regarding claim 1, Yang teaches a management method for managing a non-volatile memory express (NVMe) hard drive, applied to a non-volatile memory express, NVMe, device, and comprising: driving an NVMe hard drive by invoking a user-mode NVMe driver (Section 1. Introduction, states that the SPDK can use drivers that are implemented in user-space (user-mode)), wherein the user-mode NVMe driver is configured with a remote procedure call RPC command interface, and the RPC command interface is used to receive RPC commands, so as to perform real-time monitoring and management on the NVMe hard drive based on the received RPC commands (Section 2.3. Storage services, states the configuration interface can use JSON RPC meaning the interface is an RPC interface and the commands used are RPC commands that are used to execute management and storage functions. Fig. 2 and Section 2, shows the components of the system which (as also seen in Fig. 2 of the instant application) make up what is referred to as the management module of which the drivers communicate with. One of ordinary skill would recognize that the storage services are implemented to control the device in real-time as that is their entire purpose), registering a polling thread to periodically issue and execute associated RPC commands through the RPC command interface (Sections 2.1 and 2.2, describe the pollers and user space polling drivers which execute repeatedly on every iteration of the main loop until unregistered), acquiring event information of the NVMe hard drive, and executing corresponding processes based on a type of event information (Section 2.1. App scheduling, describe event framework used to execute threads which uses events and reactors to acquire the necessary information and execute the appropriate process depending on the event that takes place), and in response to an operation signaling, issuing and executing the associated RPC commands through the RPC command interface to perform at least one of: configuring the NVMe hard drive based on the RPC commands; or making the NVMe hard drive respond to the RPC commands (Section 2.3. Storage services, as stated previously, several of the commands that can be issued are read, write, unmap, etc. that will require the drive to respond to the command issued. While not explicitly mentioned that this is in response to a signal, one of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that a signal is sent that the device is responding to), wherein in response to the operation signaling, issuing and executing the associated RPC commands through the RPC command interface to perform at least one of: configuring the NVMe hard drive based on the RPC commands; or making the NVMe hard drive respond to the RPC commands, comprises: in response to the operation signaling, issuing and executing an NVMe hard drive firmware upgrade command, an NVMe hard drive information collection command, or an NVMe hard drive data processing command through the RPC command interface, such that the NVMe hard drive performs firmware upgrade, information feedback, or data processing based on the RPC commands (Section 2.3. Storage services, as stated in the rejection to claim 1, the commands can be data processing commands (read, write, etc.) meaning that the drive would respond to those commands as that is the purpose of issuing them). Yang does not explicitly teach the RPC commands comprise customizable personalized RPC commands.
Montazeri teaches wherein the RPC commands comprise customizable personalized RPC commands (Paragraph [0078], states the protocol used for communications can be JSON over RPC meaning the commands would be RPC commands. Paragraph [0022], states that some of the commands can be user defined (customizable personalized commands). Since both Yang and Montazeri teach the use of RPC commands it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to substitute the commands of Yang with those of Montazeri to obtain the predictable result of wherein the RPC commands comprise customizable personalized RPC commands (as all this does is describe characteristics of the commands and does not affect the rest of the operations claimed).
Regarding claim 2, Yang teaches all the limitations to claim 1. Yang further teaches wherein registering the polling thread to periodically issue and execute the associated RPC commands through the RPC command interface, acquiring the event information of the NVMe hard drive, and executing the corresponding processes based on the type of event information, comprises: executing asynchronous event reception reporting and/or alerting based on the type of event information (Section 2.2 and 3.1, state that the polling and IO operations are done using asynchronous commands/polling). The combination of and reason for combining are the same as those given in claim 1.
Regarding claims 5 and 6, claims 5 and 6 are the device claims associated with claims 1 and 2. Since Yang teaches all the limitations to claims 1 and 2, it also teaches all the limitations to claims 5 and 6; therefore the rejections to claims 1 and 2 also apply to claims 5 and 6.
Regarding claims 9 and 10, claims 9 and 10 are the computer readable medium claims associated with claims 1 and 2. Since Yang teaches all the limitations to claims 1 and 2, it also teaches all the limitations to claims 9 and 10; therefore the rejections to claims 1 and 2 also apply to claims 9 and 10.
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments filed 6/11/2026 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive. The applicant argues that the references, particularly Yang, does not teach the amended limitations to the independent claims. The examiner respectfully disagrees. As stated in the rejection to claim 1, the drivers and applications of Yang would have to be implemented in real-time to function as they are meant to manage the storage system as it operates. The applicant’s arguments also only state what Yang teaches and then makes a statement that it does not teach the amended limitations without offering any explanation as to why the teachings of Yang would not apply to the amended limitations. Therefore the rejections still hold.
Conclusion
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/NICHOLAS A. PAPERNO/Examiner, Art Unit 2132
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