Appeal 2006-2843
Application 09/872,970
claimed limitations are not taught or suggested by the applied prior art
references. After reviewing the applied Blumenau and Casorso references in
light of the arguments of record, we are in general agreement with
Appellants’ position as stated in the Briefs.
In particular, we agree with Appellants (Br. 10, Reply Br. 2-3) that, in
contrast to the claimed invention, the Blumenau reference has no disclosure
of the storage of a second copy of a mapping table in the non-volatile
memory of a controller. The Examiner has cited to several passages in
Blumenau (col. 14, ll. 31-33, col. 21, ll. 35-40, and col. 32, ll. 43-54) which
disclose that a second or back-up copy of the mapping table is stored in the
storage volumes of the cached storage subsystem. While the Examiner has
taken the position (Answer, 4, 12) that these storage volumes correspond to
the claimed controller, we find no basis on the record before us that would
support such a conclusion.
In our view, as also asserted by Appellants, the storage volumes
described by Blumenau can not be reasonably interpreted as being a
controller since they are merely logical units of storage which are distributed
over various storage devices 29-31 (Blumenau, col. 88, ll. 28-35). This
interpretation is supported by the illustration in Figure 1 of Blumenau which
shows that the storage volumes 28-31, while part of the storage subsystem
20, are in fact a separate entity from the storage controller 27. We further
make the observation that, to whatever extent the Examiner is correct in the
assertion that the backup copy of the mapping table in Blumenau
intermittently replaces the first copy of the table in the mapping agent, the
claimed limitations are not satisfied since the backup copy of the mapping
table is not in a controller as claimed.
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