Patent ID: 7574464

Claim:
A method for managing multiple volumes by a computer storage system, comprising: maintaining a volume in a flexible volume format, the flexible volume format having an aggregate of one or more virtual volumes contained therein; reading a value from a volume type field of a volume to determine if the volume is in a conventional volume format or a flexible volume format; in response to determining that the value identifies the volume as the conventional volume format, allocating a physical block to the conventional volume; in response to determining that the value identifies the volume as the flexible volume format, determining a format of a physical volume block number to virtual volume block number mapping pair (pvbn/vvbn pair) the pvbn/vvbn pair to translate a physical volume block number to a virtual volume block number; and allocating, using the format of the pvbn/vvbn pair, a physical block and a virtual block to the flexible volume, whereby the computer storage system manages multiple pvbn/vvbn volume formats simultaneously; storing the volume type field in the file system information block, and writing a block that has been modified to a storage device by an operating system.