How Obvious is the eGenera Patent?

While I've been holed up in conference presentations on virtualization, I completely missed the fact that Egenera has been awarded a patent on an N+1 tiered disaster recovery solution. I came across the news through the following post by Joe Foran. I have to agree that this one should be reconsidered in light of the recent ruling on patents and "Obviousness". While definitely written with an unapologetic point of view, this post is a good read and worth the time.

Why the eGenera Patent is Dangerous — Server Virtualization Blog

...The short of it - You have multiple boxes on a network that are mirrors of one another. One fails, another takes over its role. There’s usually hardware or software in-between that keeps things synchronized and detects the failure. This part of the patent is worded to be host-, network- and processor-inclusive, which would be obvious because most clusters are situated on networks, don’t necessarily need to run the same processors, and are hosts. The “big” improvement is in the use of the term “site” - where the product is meant to restore an entire data center’s configuration. In the press release, this means that if you have four data centers and one disaster site, if any one data center fails, the disaster site takes on the complete configuration of the failed site (i.e., all nodes, network configurations, etc.). This is a huge step forward in disaster recovery, but it’s not patent-worthy because there are a zillion ways to do this.

[Update] Bob McNeil of Egenera, whom I met on Tuesday and the IDC Virtualization 2.0 conference in San Francisco, pointed out to me that Joe Foran had the company name wrong. It's Egenera, not eGenera. He also points out that the patent was more than six years in the making and covers quite a lot of IP.

Technorati Tags: eGenera, DR, disaster recovery

Technorati Tags: disaster recovery, DR, eGenera