Patent ID: 7177883

Claim:
A hierarchical storage data management system, comprising: a plurality of application servers; a metadata server interconnected with said plurality of application servers through a local area network; a plurality of storage devices being interconnected through a plurality of data flow paths; and a storage network connecting said plurality of storage devices to said plurality of application servers and to said metadata server, wherein said metadata server comprises a metadata management element, a data value management element for assigning a data value to each of a plurality of data objects of a user corresponding to interest of the user, and a hierarchical storage management element, wherein said data value management element includes: means for receiving a plurality of user interest indicators for a plurality of data objects from said metadata management element; means for analyzing said plurality of user interest indicators; means for determining a user interest level for each of said data objects; and means for assigning to each of said data objects a data value corresponding to said user interest level, said user interest indicators include bibliographic information, words extracted from said data object and an assigned lifetime value of said data object as assigned by the user with respect to a lifetime of said data object from being stored to deleted, wherein said hierarchical storage management element includes: means for receiving a plurality of storage cost indicators from said metadata management element; means for analyzing said plurality of storage cost indicators; means for determining a storage cost level for each of a plurality of storage areas in said storage devices; means for assigning to said each storage area a storage cost value corresponding to said storage cost level, means for planning metadata adjustment by balancing between said storage cost values and metadata values assigned to metadata objects, and means for adjusting storage areas of said metadata objects as planned by said means for planning metadata adjustment, said storage cost indicators include average performance and reliability of said each storage area, and wherein said metadata server normalizes assigned data values by said data value management element and assigned storage cost values by said hierarchical storage management element by setting a range of the assigned data values to be identical with a range of the assigned storage cost values, and compares normalized data values with normalized storage cost values to determine whether to relocate data objects to different storage areas.