Patent ID: 9407700
Filing Date: 2016-08-02
CPC Classification: H04L

Claim Text:
1. A network manager system for managing a data storage network, comprising: one or more processors; memory operatively coupled to said one or more processors; program instructions in said memory for programming said one or more processors to perform network manager operations, said operations comprising: performing a discovery agent capability determination that determines discovery capabilities of two or more discovery agents in said data storage network; detecting, prior to discovery execution, whether a discovery capability overlap condition exists wherein said discovery capabilities are overlapping due to some of said agents being capable of discovering the same information from the same network device; computing agent discovery assignments prior to discovery execution based on said discovery agent capability determination and according to whether a discovery overlap condition exists; collectively, said agent discovery assignments being computed as a subset of said agent discovery capabilities in response to said discovery capability overlap condition being detected to reduce overlapping discovery; said agent discovery assignments being based on an input listing of said discovery agents, the network devices they are capable of discovering and a cost to discover each network device, and an output listing of said discovery agents and the network devices said discovery agents are assigned to discover; said agent discovery assignments being further based on an entity-sorting computation that produces an entity-sorting listing that associates each network device and one or more discovery agents each having a cost to discover that network device, said listing ordering said network devices according to the discovery costs of the associated discovery agents; and said agent discovery assignments being further based on an agent-sorting computation that produces an agent-sorting listing that modifies said entity-sorting listing to order the discovery agents associated with each network device according to one or more of agent cost, load factor and agent identifier.