Patent ID: 8275879

Claim:
A method of modeling data paths of a storage area network comprising: identifying components at a source location of a data path, at a target location of the data path, and connections there between, wherein the network environment comprises a plurality of domains, and the data path traverses the plurality of domains; assigning components and the connections there between to one of: an input-output path pattern, a virtualizer pattern, and a meta pattern, wherein the patterns represent common elements of components of the network environment, wherein the patterns and relationships between patterns are defined to repeat within and across domains in the network environment, wherein the virtualizer pattern expresses the many-to-many mapping from disk address to disk through an extent, the input-output path pattern provides for the importation of a disk through an associated initiator in one domain from a disk exported from a target of another domain, and the meta pattern indicates that a disk can be composed of zero, one, or more disks; creating a model of the data path from the assigned patterns and the defined relationships between patterns, wherein the application of the meta pattern and the virtualizer pattern in sequence describes the data path in one domain and a subsequent application of the input-output path pattern describes the data path from a disk in one domain to a disk in another domain; creating a model of the storage area network by: repeating the steps of identifying, assigning, and creating from each data path present in the storage area network; and combining each created model of each data path present in the storage area network according to connections between the data paths; and presenting the created model of the storage area network.