Appeal No. 2004-1190
Application No. 09/286,160
Opinion
We have carefully considered the subject matter on appeal, the rejections
advanced by the examiner and the evidence of obviousness relied upon by the
examiner as support for the rejections. We have, likewise, reviewed and taken
into consideration, in reaching our decision, appellants’ arguments set forth in the
brief along with the examiner’s rationale in support of the rejections and
arguments in rebuttal set forth in the examiner’s answer.
With full consideration being given to the subject matter on appeal, the
examiner’s rejections and the arguments of appellants and examiner, for the
reasons stated infra, we reverse the examiner’s rejection of claims 1 through 8
and 10 through 20 under 35 U.S.C. § 103.
Appellants argue on page 7 of the brief that the office action does not
provide a proper motivation to combine the references, as the combination would
produce an inoperative device. Further, applicant states:
In the present case, the proposed combination of the Massiglia and
Khosrowpour teachings would be inoperable. Massiglia teaches a single
controller that performs multiple types of RAID protection on a single array
of physical disks. The Khosrowpour teaches the use of redundant RAID
controllers to maintain data transfers in the event of a fault.
The combination of Massiglia and Khosrowpour suggested by the
Office Action is presumed to be achieved by using the dual RAID
controllers 140 and 200 to implement each of the layers in Massiglia (but,
this is not clear from the explanation provided in the Office Action).
However, each of the management layers in Massiglia performs different
RAID functions and mappings. In contrast, the Khosrowpour controllers
140, 200 are essentially and necessarily identical in function and
performance. Hence, if one were to combine these two references, the
functionality provided by the front-end controller and back-end controllers
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