ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,360,866, issued on July 15, was assigned to PURE STORAGE INC. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Replication using shared content mappings" was invented by David Grunwald (San Francisco), Ronald Karr (Palo Alto, Calif.), Steven Hodgson (Cobham, Great Britain) and Tabriz Holtz (Los Gatos, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Synchronizing metadata among storage systems synchronously replicating a dataset, where synchronizing the metadata includes: receiving, at a first storage system of the storage systems, an I/O operation directed to the dataset; determining, in dependence upon the I/O operation, a metadata update describing a mapping of segments...