Patent ID: 8244870

Claim:
A system comprising: a plurality of global namespace (GNS) devices, the GNS devices configured to aggregate a plurality of mount points of a plurality of hardware file systems as an aggregated mount point, each mount point of a hardware file system being a location in an operating system directory structure where a mounted file system appears; and a network switch comprising: a host-side interface comprising one or more host-side ports configured to communicate with a computing host; a storage-side interface comprising a plurality of storage-side ports configured to communicate with the GNS devices; and a load balancer configured to: present a virtual address to the computing host; present the aggregated mount point to the computing host, the aggregated mount point presented with the mount points of the plurality of hardware filing systems as a plurality of directories; and load balance traffic among the GNS devices to distribute the traffic from the computing host through the storage-side ports to the GNS devices and then to the plurality of hardware filing systems.