Netapp, Inc.

Network Appliance, Inc.

Candera, Inc.

Dipam Patel

Chandra Prasad

Kumar Gajjar

Richard Meyer

Jim Collins

Rush C Manbert

In a storage server on a storage area network, a media unit manager manages disk space in a manner transparent to the host computers. The media unit manager uses media units corresponding to the physical storage devices on the storage area network to build higher-level media units. The higher level media units can have the attributes of being sliced, concatenated, mirrored, striped, etc. Thus, the host computers need not be aware of the specific physical storage devices themselves, reducing the management and reconfiguration burden on the host computers when storage devices are added to or removed from the storage area network.

Storage virtualization and storage management to provide higher level storage services

A method and system for provisioning storage from a storage area network is provided. The provisioning includes receiving a request for a storage size and storage configuration from a storage area network according to a storage profile, identifying a storage device pool of storage devices according to a storage device candidate strategy, selecting a media unit provisioning strategy based upon the type of storage configuration specified in the storage request, generating media unit solutions using the media unit provisioning strategy and sequence of storage devices in the storage pool, determining if the media unit provisioning strategy produced a solution for the requested storage configuration and provisioning a media unit solution in response to the determination.

Method and system for strategy driven provisioning of storage in a storage area network

A storage provisioning policy is created by specifying storage heuristics for storage attributes using storage heuristic metadata. Storage attributes characterize a storage device and storage heuristic metadata describe how to specify a storage heuristic. Using the storage heuristic metadata, storage heuristics are defined to express a rule or constraint as a function of a storage attribute. In addition, the storage provisioning policy may also specify mapping rules for exporting the storage to a consumer of the storage, such as the server or server cluster.

System and method for policy based storage provisioning and management

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

Dipam Patel