Patent ID: 7007189

Claim:
A method for routing communications in a storage system, comprising: assigning a preference to each of a plurality of communication paths between a source node and a destination node, wherein each preference indicates a relative measure of how often one of the communication paths should be selected for sending one of a plurality of communications, and wherein each preference indicates that a corresponding communication path should be chosen at least once when sending the communications; receiving one of the communications to be sent from the source node to the destination node; selecting a communication path from the plurality of communication paths between the source node and the destination node; sending the communication on the selected communication path from the source node to the destination node; and repeating said receiving, said selecting, and said sending for a plurality of communications to be sent from the source node to the destination node, wherein said selecting is performed so that a more preferred path is selected more often than a less preferred path; wherein each of the communication paths between the source node and the destination node is independent of the other communication paths.