Pure Storage, Inc.

Patent Trials and Appeals Board

May 5, 2021

2020000635 (P.T.A.B. May. 5, 2021)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450
www.uspto.gov
APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO.
14/920,935 10/23/2015 MAYUR DEWAIKAR P3012US01 9674
157481 7590 05/05/2021
ALG Intellectual Property | Pure
10808 S. River Front Parkway, Suite 3100
South Jordan, UT 84095
EXAMINER
MACKALL, LARRY T
ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
2139
NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE
05/05/2021 ELECTRONIC
Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding.
The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication.
Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the
following e-mail address(es):
157481@alg-ip.com
PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)
UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
Ex parte MAYUR DEWAIKAR
Appeal 2020-000635
Application 14/920,935
Technology Center 2100

Before BRADLEY W. BAUMEISTER, JEREMY J. CURCURI, and
DAVID J. CUTITTA II, Administrative Patent Judges.

CUTITTA, Administrative Patent Judge.

DECISION ON APPEAL
STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 134(a), Appellant1 appeals from the
Examiner’s decision to reject claims 1, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, and 19, all of the
claims under consideration.2 We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We AFFIRM.

1 “Appellant” refers to “applicant” as defined in 37 C.F.R. § 1.42(a).
Appellant identifies the real party in interest as Pure Storage, Inc. Appeal
Brief filed August 1, 2019 (“Appeal Br.”) at 2.
2 Appellant has cancelled claims 2–4, 6, 9–11, 13, 16–18, and 20. Appeal
Br. 19–22.
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Application 14/920,935

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CLAIMED SUBJECT MATTER
Summary
Appellant’s claimed subject matter relates to “proactively tuning a
storage array.” Spec. ¶ 1.3 According to Appellant, the tuning includes:
determining, in dependence upon telemetry from a storage array
supporting a workload having one or more particular workload
attributes, whether performance settings of the storage array
meet predefined criteria specified in a best practices template for
the particular workload attributes; and responsive to determining
that the performance settings of the storage array do not meet the
predefined criteria specified in the best practices template for the
particular workload attributes, applying one or more
performance settings specified in the best practices template to
the storage array.
Id. ¶ 3.
Exemplary Claim
Claims 1, 8, and 15 are independent. Claim 1, reproduced below with
limitation at issue italicized, exemplifies the claimed subject matter:
1. A method of proactively tuning a storage array, the
storage array supporting workloads of different workload types,
the method comprising:
determining whether performance metrics of a storage
array meet specified performance criteria for each of the
different workload types of the workloads supported on the
storage array;
responsive to determining that the performance metrics
of the storage array do not meet the specified performance

3 In addition to the Appeal Brief noted above, we refer to: (1) the originally
filed Specification filed October 23, 2015 (“Spec.”); (2) the Final Office
Action mailed May 16, 2019 (“Final Act.”); (3) the Examiner’s Answer
mailed October 3, 2019 (“Ans.”); and (4) the Reply Brief filed November 5,
2019 (“Reply Br.”).
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Application 14/920,935

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criteria for at least one of the workload types, determining for
each workload type whether settings of the specified
performance criteria for the workload type conflict with settings
of the specified performance criteria for the other workload
types; and
responsive to determining that the settings of the
specified performance criteria conflict, determining, based on a
prioritization criteria, which of the conflicted settings to
prioritize and implementing those settings on the storage array
by modifying the storage array.
Appeal Br. 16.
REFERENCES AND REJECTION
The Examiner rejects claims 1, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, and 19 under
35 U.S.C. § 103 as obvious over the combined teachings of Mason
(US 2016/0366223 A1, published Dec. 15, 2016) and Sankaranarayan et al.
(US 6,799,208 B1, published Sept. 28, 2004) (“Sankaranarayan”). Final
Act. 2–8.
OPINION
We review the appealed rejection for error based upon the issues
identified by Appellant and in light of Appellant’s arguments and evidence.
Ex parte Frye, 94 USPQ2d 1072, 1075 (BPAI 2010) (precedential).
Arguments not made are waived. See 37 C.F.R. § 41.37(c)(1)(iv) (2019).
Appellant argues the claims as a group. Appeal Br. 7. We, thus,
select independent claim 1 as exemplary of the group. See 37 C.F.R.
§ 41.37(c)(1)(iv) (2019).
Independent claim 1 recites “responsive to determining that the
settings of the specified performance criteria conflict, determining, based on
a prioritization criteria, which of the conflicted settings to prioritize and
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implementing those settings on the storage array by modifying the storage
array.” Appeal Br. 16.
The Examiner finds Mason discloses “monitoring workloads and
determining whether the current configuration of the storage infrastructure
for the workload matches the optimal settings for the workload, but does not
specifically disclose detecting conflicts between the optimal settings of
different workloads.” Final Act. 3 (citing Mason ¶¶ 8, 9, 12, 13, 17–19, 23–
26 and Figs. 1–4) The Examiner further finds, “[i]n the same field of
endeavor, Sankaranarayan et al. disclose[s] allocating resources according to
priority when a conflict occurs.” Final Act. 4 (citing Sankaranarayan 2:13–
42, 4:42–47). The Examiner determines that sufficient motivation existed to
combine the teachings of the references. Id.
Appellant argues that the “cited portions of Mason do not describe a
situation in which two workloads are using the same infrastructure and there
is a conflict in the settings of the workloads, much less how to resolve that
conflict.” Appeal Br. 8, 13.
The Examiner responds by finding “that Mason discloses multiple
tenants having workloads that share an infrastructure,” which includes
“array 130, network 150, and host 100.” Ans. 7. In particular, the Examiner
finds that the tenants “may issue storage requests,” and then the “[s]torage
requests are analyzed and the infrastructure . . . is configured in a
configuration that is optimal for the workload.” Id.
Appellant’s argument that the “cited portions of Mason do not
describe a situation in which two workloads are using the same
infrastructure” (Appeal Br. 8) is unpersuasive. We agree with the
Examiner’s finding that “Mason discloses multiple tenants having workloads
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that share an infrastructure,” which includes, for example, storage array 130
(Ans. 7).
Appellant further argues that the “cited portions of Mason do not
describe a situation in which . . . there is a conflict in the settings of the
workloads, much less how to resolve that conflict.” Appeal Br. 13. This
argument is not responsive to the rejection, however, because the Examiner
relies on Sankaranarayan, rather than Mason, to teach the step of
determining which of the conflicted settings to prioritize, as discussed
below. Final Act. 4; Ans. 7.
Appellant next argues that “Sankaranarayan’s policy determines the
priority of the application and or users — not the performance settings of a
storage array. Said another way, the source of Sankaranarayan’s conflict is
between which user or application can use a resource — not which
performance criteria settings to use for a storage array.” Appeal Br. 14;
Reply Br. 17.
In response, the Examiner points out that Sankaranarayan teaches a
conflict between settings because it discloses that:
each resource consumer can specify one or more configurations
for each activity. If multiple configurations are specified, the
resource consumer can rank them according to preference. This
allows the resource consumers to be dynamically changed from
one configuration to another as operating conditions change. In
one aspect, resources that are needed elsewhere by a higher
priority resource consumer can be secured by asking a current
resource consumer to use a less preferred configuration, or give
up entirely its resource configuration or particular needed
resource.
Ans. 9 (citing Sankaranarayan 2:29–39) (emphasis omitted).
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According to the Examiner, “[t]his portion of Sankaranarayan
discloses that resource consumers may specify and rank multiple
configurations, such that, when a conflict arises, a lower priority consumer
may be configured with a less optimal configuration.” Ans. 9. The
Examiner additionally finds that “[t]his [teaching,] combined with the
teachings of Mason[,] provides that a tenant and/or application may have its
workload configured with a less optimal configuration, based on priorities,
when a conflict arises.” Id.
Appellant fails to show reversible error in the Examiner’s findings.
Sankaranarayan teaches a policy manager “included in the architecture to set
various policies that are used by the resource manager to allocate resources”
such as “a priority-based policy to determine which applications and/or users
have priority over others to use the resources.” Sankaranarayan 2:13–16.
Sankaranarayan further discusses “one or more resource consumers such as
a system component or application” wherein “each resource consumer can
specify one or more configurations” and “can rank them according to
preference.” Id. at 2:7–8, 29–32. We agree with the Examiner that
Sankaranarayan’s prioritizing of configurations in an application and
“asking a current resource consumer to use a less preferred configuration”
teaches prioritizing conflicted settings and implementing those settings, as
claimed. Ans. 9 (citing Sankaranarayan 2:36–38).
We also agree with the Examiner’s determination that it would have
been obvious to apply, to Mason’s storage array 130, Sankaranarayan’s
teaching of prioritizing conflicted settings and implementing those settings
in a system component or application. See Final Act. 4 (“It would have been
obvious . . . to modify the invention of Mason to include using priority to
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resolve conflicts, as taught by Sankaranarayan et al., in order to provide a
means for resource allocation when insufficient resources are available.”).
Accordingly, Appellant does not persuade us of reversible error in the
Examiner’s obviousness rejection of independent claim 1. We, therefore,
sustain the Examiner’s rejection of that claim, as well as the rejection of
claims 5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, and 19, which Appellant does not argue separately
with particularity. Appeal Br. 7, 14.
DECISION SUMMARY
In summary:
Claim(s)
Rejected
35 U.S.C. § Reference(s)/Basis Affirmed Reversed
1, 5, 7, 8,
12, 14, 15,
19
103 Mason,
Sankaranarayan
1, 5, 7, 8,
12, 14, 15,
19

TIME PERIOD FOR RESPONSE
No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with
this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a). See 37 C.F.R.
§ 1.136(a)(1)(iv).
AFFIRMED