US 5,530,899 AGranted

Archival and retrieval system accessing an external storage by polling internal queues from remote terminals minimizing interruption of a host processor

AssigneeDMI, Inc.

InventorDuncan N. MacDonald

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Abstract

An archival and retrieval system which is connected to a host computer through an asynchronous serial line. The system operates unassisted through this serial line and appears like another terminal to the host. The system includes an archival and retrieval workstation containing archival and retrieval software for controlling the memory management operations. A portion of the archival and retrieval software resides in the host and contains archival and retrieval stacks for receiving and storing archive and retrieve requests respectively from user operated terminals. At periodic intervals the archival and retrieval workstation polls the archival and retrieval stacks to see if there are any requests present. If there are, the request is transferred to the workstation and used to either store or fetch the appropriate data item. The archival and retrieval workstation includes an archival storage media such as a optical disk. The archival and retrieval system permits relatively fast access to a large capacity archival storage unit. Since the memory management functions are handled primarily by the archival retrieval workstation, the CPU is freed from these tasks and the response time of the host can thereby be improved.

Claims23

Dependent claims

In a computer system including a plurality of remote terminals, an external data storage unit and a host computer system having memory and a processor running a first operating system, a system for accessing said external data storage unit using said remote terminals while minimizing interruption of said processor comprising:

an external data storage unit;
a programmable archival and retrieval computer system including memory and a processor running a second operating system and being coupled to said host computer and said external data storage unit, said archival and retrieval computer system including:
archive and retrieve queue means installed in said host computer system for receiving and storing archive and retrieve requests received by said host computer system from said plurality of terminals;
and
archival and retrieval unit coupled to and remote from said host, said archival and retrieval unit including:
means for periodically polling said archive and retrieve queues to determine if a retrieve or archive request is contained therein;
means for retrieving a data file from said external data storage unit in response to a retrieve request in said retrieval queue;
and
means for transferring a data file from said host computer system to said external data storage unit in response to an archive request in said archive queue, whereby the archival and retrieval computer system is able to operate unassisted to expand the data storage capacity of said host computer system;
and wherein said archival and retrieval unit is resident in one of said plurality of terminals and wherein archive and retrieve requests originate from another of said plurality of terminals.

7 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.