Patent ID: 8639971

Claim:
A system including one or more collectors, said collectors each disposed to operate independently to maintain a status value relating to said system, wherein at least one said status value is disposed to change during operation of said system; one or more containers, said containers each disposed to operate independently in response to a collector, and each maintaining both said status value and metadata indicating whether said status value can be reliably used; a physical medium including global status information accessible by a computing device, said global status information indicating a single global status of said system; one or more conditions, said conditions disposed to operate on said computing device sequentially and consistently with said single global status, each responsive to one or more containers or conditions, and each associated with an output; and one or more actors, said actors disposed to operate on said computing device sequentially and consistently with said single global status, each responsive to one or more conditions, at least one of said actors disposed to operate to alter said single global status; a RAID storage system, said storage system including one or more disk drives; wherein at least one particular said actor is disposed to restripe or recompute parity, in response to a presence of a newly available and reliable disk drive; wherein said collectors and containers can operate independently to provide data relating to said single global status at speeds independently associated with each said collector or container; and said conditions and actors can rely on a consistency of said single global status to operate on said computing device at a speed independent of any collector or container, during operation of said system.