Patent ID: 7788460

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving an I/O request to write an update to an object in storage; determining whether an amount of fragmentation of the object in the storage exceeds a fragmentation threshold indicating an acceptable number of bytes stored in non-contiguous locations in response to receiving the I/O request; determining at least one logical partition including the object; determining whether the object is read-only; if the object is not read-only and if the object is within one logical partition, defragmenting the object in the storage so that blocks in the storage including the object are contiguous in response to receiving the I/O request to write the update to the object, wherein the request to write the update to the object causes the defragmentation operation; and executing the I/O request to write the update to the object in the storage without defragmenting the object in response to determining at least one of that the object is included in more than one logical partition, that the object is read-only, and that the amount of fragmentation does not exceed the fragmentation threshold.