Appeal No. 1999-0151
Application No. 08/579,552
that there is no motivation for combining the teachings
of Brant and Brownstein. The abstract comprising the
Brownstein reference teaches a caching hard disc
subsystem bundled with “Fault Freedom software, which
offers 2 levels of fault tolerance.” This software
“gives fault tolerance capabilities to users of IBM PCs,
XTs, ATs and compatibles.” Accordingly, in Brownstein,
this software is applied to computer systems, and there
is simply no suggestion to combine such software with
significantly different apparatus such as a basic storage
system comprising the failure independent storage units
S1-S5 taught by Brant.
Furthermore, even if there were a suggestion or
motivation to combine the teachings of the references, it
is not established that combining Brownstein’s teaching
with Brant would have resulted in the claimed subject
matter. With respect to independent claims 15 and 26 of
aforementioned Group I, it has not been established that
the combination would result in a second tier of at least
one failure independent data storage unit for providing
further fault tolerance. Brownstein merely refers to a
caching hard disc subsystem which provides two levels of
fault tolerance. The subsystem might be a single hard
disc, which would form but one tier of the claimed two
tier subsystem. As to the independent claims 37, 59 and
67 of Group II, it has not been shown that the
combination would result in failure independent storage
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