Patent ID: 7769975

Claim:
A method for defining a volume in a storage system, comprising: providing information on a plurality of storage device groups, wherein each storage group includes storage devices having common storage device attributes; receiving selection of at least one storage device group; receiving selection of an array type; configuring arrays as the selected array type using storage devices included in the at least one selected storage group; assigning the configured arrays to first and second extent pools, wherein multiple of the arrays are assigned to the first extent pool; configuring a plurality of extents in the first and second extent pools, wherein each extent configured in the first and second extent pools comprises a portion of one of the arrays assigned to the first and second extent pools, respectively, wherein the extents of the plurality of extents in the first extent pool comprise portions of the arrays assigned to the first extent pool; configuring a source volume from the extents in the first extent pool, wherein the extents configured in the source volume comprise portions from at least two of the arrays assigned to the first extent pool; and configuring a target volume from at least one extent in the second extent pool, wherein data from the source volume is copied to the target volume.