Patent ID: 7143116

Claim:
A method for managing an amount of disk usage by an user in a system including a plurality of network storages which provide users with respective disk spaces, the method comprising the steps of: registering a disk quota to said user, said disk quota indicates an upper limit of a total disk usage of said user in said system; at a timing of judging a limit of disk usage based on measurements, measuring disk usage of said user in each of said network storages, subtracting the measured disk usages from the registered disk quota and registering the remainder as a threshold value indicating an amount of disc space remaining for said user; and each time when a write request is issued from said user, accumulating write size estimated from each of write requests which have been issued from said user after said timing of judging a limit of disk usage, and checking whether the accumulated write size exceeds the registered threshold value or not, wherein, if the accumulated write size does not exceed the registered threshold value, allowing a latest write request from said user to be executed, and wherein, if the accumulated write size exceeds the threshold value, a next-time judging of a limit of disk usage based on measurements is started, wherein the next-time judging comprises the steps of: measuring again disk usage of said user in each of the network storages, and comparing a summation of newly measured disk usages and a write size estimated from a latest write request from said user with said registered disk quota, if the summation of the newly measured disk usages and the write size estimated from the latest write request does not exceed the registered disk quota, allowing the latest write request to be executed and updating said threshold value to use for checking on succeeding write requests from said user, and otherwise, if the summation exceeds the disk quota, refusing the latest write request from said user and informing said user of a quota error.