Patent ID: 7350050

Claim:
A storage system comprising: a plurality of disk drives; and a disk controller that is connected to the disk drives and reads/writes data from/into the disk drives, wherein the disk controller comprises: a disk control unit that exchanges data with the disk drives; a channel control unit that exchanges data with another computer; a cache memory unit that temporarily holds data; a switch unit that is connected to the disk control unit and the channel control units and exchanges data therewith; and a control unit that controls the disk control unit, the channel control unit, and the switch unit, wherein the disk controller is partitioned into a plurality of logical partitions, wherein the control unit controls the partitioning into the logical partitions, wherein said switch unit includes a storage unit adapted to store information indicating a ratio of a band width allocated for each of the logical partitions and an arbitration unit adapted to control a data transmission band width of each of the logical partitions by referring to the band width allocations for each of the logical partitions stored in the storage unit, wherein said disk controller is partitioned into logical partitions and holds processor unit logical partition (LPAR) information indicating a ratio of processing of the processor units, switch unit LPAR information indicating a ratio of a band width allocated to each partitioned LPAR and cache memory unit LPAR information indicating a ratio of a cache memory capacity to be used by each partitioned LPAR, and wherein said disk control unit controls partitioning of the channel control unit, the disk control unit, the switch unit, the processor unit and the cache memory unit based on the LPAR information.