Patent ID: 7779175

Claim:
A method operative in a distributed system comprising a set of storage devices in a communications network, comprising: receiving a rendezvous access request from the communications network that comprises a set of one or more action parameters, a set one or more event parameters, and a set of one or more location parameters, wherein, for a given access operation, an action parameter describes an access to be performed, an associated event parameter specifies a time with respect to which the access is to be performed, and the location parameter describes a source or destination object associated with the access; in response to receipt of a rendezvous access request, transforming the rendezvous access request into a set of one or more device-specific requests; providing the one or more device-specific requests to a subset of the storage devices of the set of storage devices in the communications network such that the given access operation is performed in a manner that satisfies the action parameters, event parameters and the location parameters, wherein the given access operation has an associated access pattern characteristic, wherein the characteristic is one of: sequential periodic, statistical interactive, and best-effort quasi-random.