Patent ID: 8566550

Claim:
A storage system for storage management in a tiered storage environment in a system having one or more applications running on a host computer which is connected to the storage system, the storage system comprising: a plurality of storage volumes in a pool which are divided into a plurality of tiers having different tier levels, the tiers being organized according to a tier configuration rule, the plurality of storage volumes provided by a plurality of physical storage devices in the storage system; and a controller controlling the plurality of physical storage devices, the controller including a processor and a memory; wherein the controller allocates the pool to a plurality of virtual volumes based on a change of the tier levels against the physical storage devices; wherein the controller stores a relation between data in the storage system being accessed by each application running on the host computer and an application ID of the application running on the host computer and accessing the data; wherein the application ID of the application accessing the data is provided in an I/O (Input/Output) frame sent from the host computer; and wherein the tier level of a portion of a storage volume of the plurality of storage volumes is changed based at least in part on the application accessing data in the storage volume as identified by the relation between the data and the application ID of the application accessing the data.