Patent ID: 7509443

Claim:
A storage management system comprising at least an application server to which an application program is assigned; at least a storage subsystem having a storage area used for the application program; and a management server for extracting an I/O path from a plurality of candidate I/O paths between the application server and the storage subsystem, wherein the management server includes a storage unit and a processing unit, wherein the storage unit of the management server manages a combination of I/O paths between the application server and the storage subsystem, and various performance values on component elements of the I/O paths, wherein the processing unit of the management server, upon receipt of a request from an external device to newly assign an application program to a specified application server, acquires the plurality of candidate I/O paths between the requested application server and the storage subsystem combined with the application server from the combination of the I/O paths managed by the storage unit, wherein an I/O path having a performance value satisfying conditions from the external device is extracted from the acquired plurality of candidate I/O paths based on the various performance values managed by the storage unit, and wherein the extracted I/O path is output externally as a candidate path, wherein the plurality of candidate I/O paths is determined based on predetermined conditions including average transfer rate of server-side ports, average transfer rate of storage-side ports, average response time of array groups, average hit ratio of cache partitions, maximum importance degree of application sharing resources, and maximum importance degree of application sharing I/O peak time zones, and wherein candidate I/O paths satisfying these predetermined conditions are displayed for a user to extract an optimized I/O path from the plurality of candidate I/O paths with the optimized path being determined based on display information including path candidate numbers, server-side port names, server-side port average transfer rates, storage subsystem names, storage-side port names, storage-side port average transfer rates, array group names, array group average response times, cache partition names, cache partition average hit ratios, maximum importance degree of application sharing resources, and maximum importance degree of application sharing I/O peak time zones.