Patent ID: 7266538

Claim:
In a computer system, a method for controlling access to data in a disk-based data storage system, the method comprising the steps of: detecting a requirement of the computer system to access data in the disk-based data storage system, the detecting comprising detecting a file system request originating from a process operating in the computer system for access to data in the data storage system; identifying a data access policy based on the requirement of the computer system to access data, the data access policy defining a memory management technique to use within the data storage system, the memory management technique including at least one of a cache determination and a prefetch determination, the data access policy based on at least two of the group including requester attributes, data access technique attributes, data attributes, and policy attributes; and including, within a data access request, a data access policy identifier that corresponds to the identified data access policy, the data access request being generated by the computer system based on the requirement of the computer system to access data in the disk-based data storage system, and wherein said including, within a data access request, a data access policy identifier comprises the steps of: detecting which data access requests of a plurality of data access requests are to be transmitted to the data storage system and that are associated with the file system request for which at least one data access policy is selected; obtaining at least one respective data access policy identifier for each of the at least one selected data access policy; and modifying the data access requests that are associated with the file system request to include the at least one respective data access policy identifier such that data access requests associated with the file system request contain an indication of the data access policy to use within the data storage system with respect data associated with those data access requests; transmitting the data access request including the data access policy identifier to the disk-based data storage system to cause the disk-based data storage system to service the data access request and to utilize the memory management technique; and determining, with a thread mapper, thread identification associated with a file system request and providing said thread identification to a device driver.