PTAB

IPR2022-00566

HaShiCorp Inc v. Invincible IP LLC

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Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Methods for Power Savings in a Data Center
  • Brief Description: The ’634 patent relates to methods and systems for power saving in data centers. The technology involves identifying "user-provided hardware independent power saving codes" from virtual machines (VMs) and converting them into device-specific messages to enable or disable computer hardware components.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Anticipation of Claims 1-3, 5, 11-13, and 15 by Gebhart

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Gebhart (Application # 2009/0217072).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Gebhart disclosed every limitation of the challenged claims. Gebhart’s system used a centralized controller in a data center to receive shutdown or hibernation instructions from applications running on multiple VMs. The controller identified which instructions were relevant to a specific host computer, converted those instructions into a specific power management message for that host, and provided the message to the host. In response, the host would perform a power-saving action, such as a full shutdown or hibernating specific devices (e.g., a hard drive or network card), thereby enabling or disabling devices as required by the claims.

Ground 2: Obviousness of Claims 1-3, 5-6, 10-13, 15-16, and 20 over Gebhart in view of Tewari

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Gebhart (Application # 2009/0217072), Tewari (Application # 2006/0005184).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that Gebhart taught the foundational system of managing power for hosts in a data center based on high-level commands from VMs. Tewari was argued to teach a complementary system where a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) receives more granular, device-specific power state requests from multiple VMs (e.g., setting a fan to "low," "med," or "high"). Tewari’s VMM aggregates these potentially conflicting requests to determine a final state for each device and implements it.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Tewari's fine-grained device control with Gebhart's data center management system to provide more sophisticated power-saving options. Petitioner argued this combination was a natural way to implement the "other power management mechanisms" explicitly suggested by Gebhart. The combination would provide enhanced power-saving benefits and improved system resiliency, as Tewari's system could gracefully handle requests for non-existent or non-functional hardware—a common issue in data centers with migrating VMs as described in Gebhart.
    • Expectation of Success: The combination involved applying Tewari's known, predictable power-control techniques within the established framework of Gebhart. Petitioner argued this would have been a routine integration to achieve well-understood benefits without changing the operational principles of either system.

Ground 3: Obviousness of Claim 21 over Gebhart, Tewari, and Ben-Yehuda

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Gebhart (Application # 2009/0217072), Tewari (Application # 2006/0005184), and Ben-Yehuda (Application # 2009/0164990).

  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground built upon the Gebhart and Tewari combination to address the specific limitations of independent claim 21, which required two computing systems each using a "paravirtualized driver." Petitioner argued that Gebhart and Tewari collectively taught the claimed power management functionality across multiple computers. Ben-Yehuda was introduced to explicitly teach the use of paravirtualized drivers, describing them as a "traditional" and "more efficient" approach for VMs to control hardware compared to software emulation.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would implement the device control system of Gebhart and Tewari using the more efficient paravirtualized driver approach taught by Ben-Yehuda. This was presented as a predictable design choice to improve performance in the virtualized data center environment.
    • Expectation of Success: Given that Ben-Yehuda described paravirtualization as a well-known and superior method, a POSITA would have reasonably expected success in applying this driver architecture to the systems of Gebhart and Tewari.

  • Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted further obviousness challenges for various dependent claims. These were based on adding Jackson (for providing a power simulator to estimate power utilization), Papathanasiou (for predicting a future need for a disabled device and warming it up in time), and Ewing (for logging power usage and providing a monetary benefit based on savings) to the core Gebhart and Tewari combination.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "User-Provided Hardware Independent Power Saving Codes": Petitioner dedicated significant argument to this term.
    • It contended "user-provided" encompasses codes inserted into an application by a programmer and does not require entry by an end-user at runtime.
    • It argued "hardware independent" means the codes do not require specific knowledge of the underlying hardware configuration on which the VM is running, which is consistent with the general nature of virtualized environments where applications are abstracted from the physical hardware.

5. Arguments Regarding Discretionary Denial

  • Petitioner argued against discretionary denial under 35 U.S.C. §325(d), asserting that the primary prior art references were not substantively considered during prosecution. Although Gebhart was listed in an Information Disclosure Statement (IDS), the Examiner only applied it to certain dependent claims and never addressed its anticipatory effect on the independent claims. Other key references, including Tewari, Jackson, Papathanasiou, and Ben-Yehuda, were never before the Office.

6. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-22 of Patent 8,938,634 as unpatentable.