Patent ID: 7693884

Claim:
A method of managing a storage system, said storage system comprising a first storage space and a second storage space, said first storage space comprising a plurality of files, each file of said plurality of files being characterized by at least one attribute, said storage system further assigning a policy to each attribute, said method comprising: determining a policy-specific probability distribution for each policy; determining a policy-specific probability for each file by use of said policy-specific probability distribution; determining a total probability for each file by use of each policy-specific probability; determining said total probability by adding the policy-specific probabilities of each file, wherein each policy-specific probability is multiplied by a predefined weight factor, and wherein the total probability is normalized by a factor so that the total probability lies between 0 and 1; moving each file of said plurality of files having a total probability equal to 1 from said first storage space to said second storage space; moving files of said plurality of files having a total probability between 0 and 1, if the storage space used on said first storage space reaches a high threshold value until a low threshold value is reached, said low threshold value and said high threshold value being predefined.