Patent ID: 8909769

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for determining optimal component location in a networked computing environment, comprising: collecting, in a computer storage device, network traffic meta-data for each of at least one network-attached storage (NAS) device and at least one cache device in the networked computing environment, the network traffic meta-data identifying a number of hops a set of data makes as the set of data is communicated between the at least one NAS device and the at least one cache device, the network traffic meta-data comprising at least one of the following: a propagation delay, a processing and serialization delay, a queuing delay, and a latency of communication as the set of data is communicated between the at least one NAS device and the at least one cache device under the existing network topology; determining a current network topology of the at least one NAS device and the at least one cache device based on the network traffic meta-data; analyzing the network traffic meta-data of a traffic pattern between the at least one NAS device and the at least one cache device; determining an optimized network topology for the at least one NAS device relative to the at least one cache device based on the analysis of the network traffic meta-data, the optimized network topology minimizing the number of hops the set of data makes as the set of data is communicated between the at least one NAS device and the at least one cache device; and implementing the optimized network topology.