Maintaining availability of critical information in a distributed storage network

ChangeBridge: Patent Grants - Networking (H04L)

Published April 7th, 2026

Detected April 7th, 2026

Summary

USPTO granted patent US12596598B2 to Pure Storage, Inc. covering methods and apparatus for maintaining availability of critical information in distributed storage networks using dispersed storage error encoding. The patent protects technology for identifying, encoding, and distributing critical information across multiple storage units to ensure operational continuity.

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What changed

USPTO issued patent grant US12596598B2 to Pure Storage, Inc. for methods relating to maintaining availability of critical information in distributed storage networks. The patent covers processing modules that identify critical information, apply dispersed storage error encoding, and distribute encoded slices across selected storage units to ensure data access operations can continue even if individual storage units fail.

For technology companies and data storage providers, this patent represents potential IP considerations for developing similar distributed storage systems. Companies offering cloud storage, data backup services, or distributed computing infrastructure should monitor the patent landscape to assess potential licensing needs or design-around opportunities for their storage availability technologies.

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Source document (simplified)

← USPTO Patent Grants

Maintaining availability of critical information in a distributed storage network

Grant US12596598B2 Kind: B2 Apr 07, 2026

Assignee

Pure Storage, Inc.

Inventors

Thomas D. Cocagne, Asimuddin Kazi, Jason K. Resch

Abstract

Methods and apparatus for maintaining availability of critical information in a storage network that includes a plurality of storage units. In an embodiment, a processing module(s) of the storage network identifies critical information stored in one or more memory devices of a computing device. Critical information can include, for example, information required for operation of one or more storage units to perform data access operations. The processing module obtains the critical information from the one or more memory devices, and dispersed storage error encodes the critical information to produce one or more sets of encoded critical slices. The processing module further selects a set of storage units of the storage network and facilitates storage of the one or more sets of encoded critical slices in the selected set of storage units.