Patent ID: 8024169

Claim:
A method of simulating a storage area network including a set of correlated devices, each of the devices having a device agent, the method comprising: forming a set of simulation agents representing said device agents, including the steps of, i) for each of the simulation agents, obtaining a set of agent profiles in a first mode using a snapshot approach and in a second mode using a configuration approach, and storing said agent profiles in a data store, and ii) obtaining files describing class definitions for the simulation agents, and storing said files in the data store; and producing a display of said simulation agents wherein the device agents include profiles, and the step of obtaining a set of agent profiles includes the steps of: taking snapshots of the profiles of the device agents to obtain snapshot profiles; cleansing, indexing and persisting the snapshot profiles in the data store; keeping the agent profiles of the device agents unchanged during the step of taking snapshots, and combining snapshots of the profiles of individual ones of the device agents.