Patent ID: 7284011

Claim:
A method for reporting file characteristics in a storage area network comprising: traversing a plurality of file entities to identify file data concerning attributes of the file entities according to predetermined metadata; gathering multidimensional data sets corresponding to each of the identified file entities, each of the multidimensional data sets having a predetermined number of dimensions indicative of an attribute; and aggregating the gathered multidimensional data sets to build an aggregated data cube indicative of collective metrics of each attribute for each of the traversed file entities, aggregating further comprising: scanning, for each of the dimensions, data values corresponding to the attributes of each of the scanned dimensions; identifying, for each of the scanned data values, a bucket corresponding to the data value; and storing, in a split word format, values corresponding to the dimension and the bucket, the split word format employing a portion of the split word for the dimension value and the remaining portion of the word for the bucket value.