Patent ID: 8782245

Claim:
A method for managing allocation of storage resources in a storage network, wherein the storage network includes physical data storage on one or more storage arrays that are in the storage network, and the network is in communication with one or more hosts and the network further includes a storage network management system that includes a storage virtualizer capable of intercepting and virtualizing an IO stream from the one or more hosts and which storage network management system further includes a storage and connectivity controller in communication with the storage virtualizer for storage network management, and the method comprises the steps of: the storage network management system allocating one or more virtual data storage volumes for use by a host computer; the storage network management system presenting the virtual data storage volumes to the host computer as representative of available physical storage on the one or more storage arrays, but not allocating physical data storage for the virtual data storage volumes, wherein the virtual data storage volumes can include regions that are either allocated to physical storage or are unallocated to physical storage pending an IO write request that would normally transform the unallocated regions to allocated regions; and if a write IO goes to an unallocated region and the data of that write to the region is predictable by the storage network management system, then the storage network management system suppressing the write IO and thus avoiding allocation of the unallocated region that would normally have been transformed to an allocated region, and wherein a read IO for the predicted data is responded to with a creation of the data by the storage network management system in order to reduce what would otherwise be normal transformation of an unallocated region to an allocated region.