Patent ID: 7467143

Claim:
A storage operation management method for managing operations of a plurality of storage devices storing information that is provided to a business server having a plurality of applications accessed via a network, the method executed by an operation management server coupled to the network, comprising: acquiring, from the plurality of storage devices, characteristic values defined for each volume of the plurality of storage devices, and storing the acquired characteristic values in memory with a correspondence to said each volume defined thereby; obtaining a performance level and a reliability level of each of the volumes according to a type of an application, and storing the obtained performance and reliability levels, wherein said performance and reliability levels are obtained by using attribute information defined for each of the volumes and evaluation function coefficients previously stored in association with the type of application; obtaining upper and lower limit threshold values of each of a plurality of classification levels from the obtained performance and reliability levels of each of the volumes, based on a policy for selecting volumes, and making a correspondence between each of the volumes and each of the classification levels based on the classification level to which the performance and reliability values of each volume correspond; and determining a candidate volume to be selected and made accessible to said business server, based on a classification level designated by a user and on the correspondence between each of the volumes and each of the classification levels, wherein said classification levels are obtained according to evaluation values of attribute information of each of the volumes by using an evaluation function for each application, and the upper and lower limit threshold values for each of the classification levels are obtained by dividing the total amount of the volumes based on a ratio according to each of the classification levels provided by the policy.