{"schema_version":"1.0","canonical_url":"https://patentable.app/patents/US-9836229","patent":{"patent_number":"US-9836229","title":"N-way merge technique for updating volume metadata in a storage I/O stack","assignee":null,"inventors":[],"filing_date":"2014-11-18T00:00:00.000Z","publication_date":"2017-12-05T00:00:00.000Z","cpc_codes":["G06F","G06F","G06F","G06F","G06F","G06F","G06F","H04L"],"num_claims":20,"abstract":"A N-way merge technique efficiently updates metadata in accordance with a N-way merge operation managed by a volume layer of a storage input/output (I/O) stack executing on one or more nodes of a cluster. The metadata is embodied as mappings from logical block addresses (LBAs) of a logical unit (LUN) accessible by a host to durable extent keys, and is organized as a multi-level dense tree. The mappings are organized such that a higher level of the dense tree contains more recent mappings than a next lower level, i.e., the level immediately below. The N-way merge operation is an efficient (i.e., optimized) way of updating the volume metadata mappings of the dense tree by merging the mapping content of all three levels in a single iteration, as opposed to merging the content of the first level with the content of the second level in a first iteration of a two-way merge operation and then merging the results of the first iteration with the content of the third level in a second iteration of the operation."},"analysis":{"summary":null,"layman_explanation":null,"technical_analysis":null,"business_analysis":null,"faqs":null,"topics":[],"tech_cluster":null},"seo":{"title":"N-way merge technique for updating volume metadata in a storage I/O stack","description":"A N-way merge technique efficiently updates metadata in accordance with a N-way merge operation managed by a volume layer of a storage input/output (I/O) stack executing on one or more nodes of a clus","keywords":[]},"attribution":{"source":"Patentable","source_url":"https://patentable.app","canonical_url":"https://patentable.app/patents/US-9836229","license":"CC-BY-4.0-like","license_terms":"AI-generated analysis on this page (summary, layman_explanation, technical_analysis, business_analysis, faqs) may be reused with attribution and a visible link back to the canonical URL above. Patent abstracts, claims, and bibliographic data are USPTO public domain.","required_link":"https://patentable.app/patents/US-9836229","citation_suggestion":"Patentable. \"N-way merge technique for updating volume metadata in a storage I/O stack\" (US-9836229). https://patentable.app/patents/US-9836229","copyright_holder":"Nomic Interactive Technology LLC"},"links":{"html":"https://patentable.app/patents/US-9836229","json":"https://patentable.app/api/llm-context/US-9836229","site":"https://patentable.app","llms_txt":"https://patentable.app/llms.txt"},"generated_at":"2026-06-06T08:02:16.835Z"}