Patent ID: 8260924

Claim:
A method for user load balancing, the method comprising: identifying with a user load balancing system when an overall load of one or more user data loads in at least one of two or more storage servers exceeds one or more thresholds, wherein the one or more user data loads in at least one of the two or more storage servers comprises stateful data; determining with the user load balancing system whether the overall load of one or more user data loads exceeds the one or more thresholds temporarily or persistently; transferring with the user load balancing system one or more of the user data loads in the identified overall load in one of the storage servers to one or more of the other storage servers only when the one or more thresholds is determined to be exceeded persistently based upon the identifying with the user load balancing system, wherein the transferring further comprises placing the one or more user data loads to be transferred in storage which is read only accessible until the transferring one or more user data loads is completed; identifying with the user load balancing system any changes to the one or more transferred user data loads which occurred during the transferring; and updating with the user load balancing system the one or more transferred user data loads with the identified differences; and updating with the user load balancing system a directory with one or more new locations to the determined one or more other storage servers for each of the one or more transferred user data loads to be configured to respond to a query from an application.