Patent ID: 8843459

Claim:
In a storage system having a plurality of storage devices, wherein different storage devices may be associated with different storage characteristics, a multi-tiered filesystem method comprising: aggregating storage from the plurality of storage devices into a storage pool having a plurality of storage tiers, the storage tiers having different storage characteristics; allocating storage from a plurality of the storage tiers for a multi-tiered filesystem; aggregating the allocated storage into a contiguous filesystem storage space such that at least two regions of the contiguous filesystem storage space are associated with different storage tiers; and for storing a particular quantum of data: selecting a storage tier for the quantum of data; allocating, from the contiguous filesystem storage space, at least one block of storage from at least one region associated with the selected storage tier; and storing the quantum of data in the at least one allocated storage block, wherein the storage system is operable to store user data associated with a user file into at least one storage device forming a lower storage tier in the storage pool and to store user metadata for managing the user file into at least one storage device forming a higher storage tier in the storage pool based on the types of the storage devices and the type of the user data and the user metadata; the user metadata stored in the higher storage tier separately from the user data stored in the lower storage tier.