Patent ID: 7487322

Claim:
An article of manufacture including program logic stored on a computer readable storage medium for allocating storage space to a storage pool, wherein the program logic causes operations to be performed, the operations comprising: storing associations between locations on storage devices and a storage pool, wherein the storage pool is a grouping of volumes on the storage devices, wherein the storage pool spans at least one of multiple file systems and multiple directories within a file system, wherein each file system enables creation and management of files on the volumes on the storage devices and enables performing Input/Output (I/O) operations to those files, and wherein at least one of the file systems includes multiple directories; receiving a request for storage space for the storage pool; obtaining a list of locations associated with the storage pool, wherein the locations represent locations on the storage devices that are part of the storage pool; applying one or more allocation techniques to select one or more locations from the list of locations at which storage space is to be allocated to the storage pool; and allocating the storage space at the selected one or more locations to the storage pool.