Patent ID: 6904599

Claim:
A storage management system on a computer comprising: a volume provider to map a logical storage volume onto one or more storage devices of a storage subsystem, wherein the volume provider presents an application programming interface (API), the API conforming to Component Object Model (COM) interface, to applications on the computer; the API for receiving first desired behavioral attributes of the logical storage volume; the volume provider reconfigures the logical storage volume of the one or more storage devices by monitoring and comparing access patterns of the logical storage volume using the first attributes received from a first application and second desired behavioral attributes previously received via the API from a second application, wherein the volume provider reconfigures the logical storage volume if the access patterns differs from the first or second desired behavioral attributes; and wherein the first and second attributes are selected from a set of predefined attributes including fault tolerance attribute, a fast crash recovery required attribute, a removable attribute, an optimize for sequential reads attribute, an optimize for sequential writes attributes, an optimize for mostly reads attribute, a reconfiguration allowed attribute, an expected maximum size attribute, an optimal read size attribute, an optimal read alignment attribute, optimal write attribute, an optimal write alignment attribute, a maximum number spindles attribute, an interleave size attribute, and a rebuild priority attribute.