Patent ID: 7647451

Claim:
A method, comprising: coupling two or more computers together to form a cluster; organizing a plurality of volumes as a striped volume set, wherein the plurality of volumes are distributed across the cluster and each volume is a logical arrangement of one or more storage devices coupled to a computer of the two or more computers; associating the striped volume set with a set of striping rules that define a stripe algorithm, a stripe width and a list of volumes; apportioning data container content as stripes, each stripe having a size specified by the stripe width; placing the stripes across the volumes in a manner specified by the stripe algorithm that reflects a deterministic pattern of fixed length such that the stripes are distributed substantially equal among the volumes; adding an additional volume to the striped volume set; and moving only 1/N of the stripes to the additional volume, wherein N equals a number of volumes in the striped volume set.