Patent ID: 7921424

Claim:
A method for balancing data load on a federation of servers, the method comprising: creating a new physical partition on a new server in a federation of servers; and utilizing the new server to balance data load, wherein utilizing the new server comprises: selecting a first logical partition and a second logical partition from different existing servers in the federation of servers to be moved to the new physical partition on the new server; concurrently suspending writes to the selected logical partitions of the different existing servers; after suspending writes to the selected logical partitions, copying the selected logical partitions to the new physical partition; redirecting reads and writes for the selected logical partitions on the different existing servers to the copied logical partitions in the new physical partition; and removing the selected logical partitions from the different existing servers that were copied to the new physical partition; wherein the new physical partition on the new server comprises a primary data structure for storing primary data residing on a first server of the plurality of existing servers of the federation of servers and a secondary data structure for storing a backup of the primary data residing on a second server of the plurality of existing servers of the federation of servers; and wherein the selected logical partitions comprise a subset of the primary data on said first server to be stored in the primary data structure of the new physical partition and a corresponding subset of the backup of the primary data in said second server to be stored in the secondary data structure of the new physical partition.