Patent 7788488 was granted and assigned to Hitachi on August, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Upon detection of a virus definition file update, a virus check server mounts a computer's storage area in a storage apparatus via a network to check whether or not a file stored in the storage area is infected with a virus. For the virus check, the virus check server communicates with the storage apparatus via a path different from the one that is laid between a user computer and the storage system. Therefore, a virus check executed by the virus check server does not lower the computer's communication speed and disk access speed.