Cloud Document Fragmentation for Legacy Compatibility
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional monolithic documents are not easily accessible from disparate geographic locations, lack disaster and outage survivability, and are difficult to share content between, posing incompatibility with legacy systems designed for locally stored documents.
Innovation Solution
A software and hardware facility that maintains documents as geographically-distributed cloud services using document fragments, allowing for easy access and sharing, and provides local proxies for seamless interaction with legacy tools, utilizing erasure coding for disaster and outage survivability.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If documents are stored as monolithic files in a single location, then document integrity is maintained, but accessibility from disparate geographic locations deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments monolithic documents into smaller document fragments that can be distributed across multiple storage devices in different geographic locations. Each fragment contains a portion of the document content and metadata, allowing parallel access from multiple locations while maintaining document integrity through coordinated retrieval and assembly of all fragments.
2Reliability
If entire copies of documents are stored on multiple storage devices in different locations, then disaster survivability is improved, but system complexity deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
Instead of storing complete document copies across multiple devices, the patent divides documents into fragments and distributes these fragments across storage devices. This segmentation reduces the complexity of managing multiple full copies while maintaining disaster survivability, as the system only needs to manage and retrieve fragment portions rather than complete document replicas.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates a universal document fragment structure that serves multiple functions: it enables disaster survivability through distribution, facilitates accessibility from multiple locations, and provides a standardized format for document assembly. This multi-functional fragment design reduces overall system complexity by eliminating the need for separate mechanisms for each function.
3Ease of operation
If documents are distributed as fragments across cloud storage, then accessibility and sharing are improved, but compatibility with legacy systems deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces document fragments as an intermediary structure between cloud storage systems and legacy applications. These fragments serve as a universal interface that enables cloud-based document distribution and sharing while maintaining compatibility with legacy systems through standardized fragment formats and retrieval mechanisms that legacy systems can understand and process.
Data Source
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AI summary
A facility for providing document contents from a server is described. The facility receives from a separate client computing system a retrieval request to return a document identified by a document identifier contained by the retrieval request. The retrieval request has been originated by the client computing system in response to an open request for a file stored on the client computing system that contains the document identifier. The facility transmits to the client a response containing at least a portion of a document to which the document identifier contained by the retrieval request corresponds.