Invalidity dossier
US 7107385
Storage virtualization by layering virtual disk objects on a file system
Current assignee: NetApp Inc
Added 9/23/2026, 1:52:44 PM
Active provider: DeepSeek · deepseek-flash
Patent summary
Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.
Patent Overview — US 7,107,385 B2 (supplied text only)
Title: "Storage virtualization by layering virtual disk objects on a file system"
Identifiers/dates: Publication number US7107385B2; application US10/216,453; filed 2002-08-09; prior art date 2002-08-09; granted/publication date 2006-09-12. Legal status listed as "Expired – Lifetime," with adjusted expiration 2023-02-23. Other version: US20040030822A1.
Assignee: Current assignee listed as NetApp Inc.; original assignee Network Appliance Inc. Inventors: Vijayan Rajan, Mohan Srinivasan, Brian Pawlowski, David Brittain Bolen, Blake H. Lewis.
Purpose (from the supplied text): The invention "relates to storage systems and, in particular, to storage virtualization on a storage system, such as a multi-protocol storage appliance." It concerns a storage system that provides storage service for organizing information on writable persistent storage devices, deployable in SAN or NAS environments, and embodied as a file server whose operating system implements a file system organizing information as a hierarchical structure of directories and files.
Plain-language scope (as the excerpt permits): The title states the core idea—virtual disk objects are layered on a file system to virtualize storage. Consistent with this, the classifications cluster around digital input/output to record carriers (G06F3/06), storage-system interfaces (G06F3/0601), administration (G06F3/0604), space-entity management such as partitions/extents/pools (G06F3/0644), virtualization aspects at area level like provisioning virtual or logical volumes (G06F3/0665), and distributed or networked storage such as SAN/NAS (G06F3/067), plus file systems and file servers (G06F16/10). Prior-art keywords: vdisk, storage, file, inode, data.
Not established by the excerpt: No claims, detailed description, or drawings are included, so the actual claim scope, limitations, and specific mechanisms are not established. No prior art is identified or discussed, and no comparison to alternatives is shown. Family/litigation links appear in the source listing, but their substance is not described here.
Generated 10/1/2026, 9:52:45 PM
Cases on file (0)
Specific litigation cases in our database that name US patent 7107385. The free-form analysis below may also discuss cases beyond this list.
No cases on file mention this patent. Upload a CSV or add a case manually in Admin → Manage litigation cases.
Litigation summary
Past and pending lawsuits — plaintiffs, defendants, jurisdictions, outcomes, and notable rulings.
Proceedings on file (0)
All PTAB activity →AIA trial proceedings (IPR / PGR / CBM) filed at the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board against this patent. Sourced from the USPTO Open Data Portal and refreshed every six hours; each proceeding number deep-links to the PTAB E2E docket.
No PTAB proceedings on file. This patent has not been challenged via IPR, PGR, or CBM. The absence is itself a signal — well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs. The LLM analysis below may surface filings the ODP feed hasn’t indexed yet.
PTAB challenges
AIA trial proceedings at the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board — IPR, PGR, and CBM. Petitioners, judge panels, claim-level invalidation outcomes from Final Written Decisions, and Federal Circuit appeals. The single most important defensive datapoint after litigation history.
Assignment history
Inventors, original assignee, and the chain of ownership recorded with the USPTO — including the correspondent attorney who recorded each assignment, since shell-LLC chains often share one repeat-player attorney even when the entity names look unrelated. Surfaces NPE / patent-troll patterns: shell-entity transfers, known asserters in the chain, repeat correspondent fingerprints, pre-litigation assignments, and bankruptcy fire-sales.
Prior art
Earlier patents, publications, and products that may anticipate or render the claims unpatentable.
Obviousness
Combinations of prior art that suggest the claimed invention would have been obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103.
Extensions
Patent term adjustments, term extensions, continuations, divisionals, family members, and expiration dates.
Derivative works
Defensive disclosure: derivative variations of each claim designed to render future incremental improvements obvious or non-novel.