Patent ID: 7962609

Claim:
A system comprising: a plurality of equivalent servers each being responsible for serving a portion of stored data blocks in response to client requests for access to the data blocks; each of said plurality of equivalent servers having a respective data mover process capable of communicating with another respective data mover process on another server of said plurality of equivalent servers, for coordinating movement of data blocks between the plurality of equivalent servers; each of said plurality of equivalent servers also having a respective request monitor process communicating with another respective request monitor process on another server of said plurality of equivalent servers; each of said respective request monitor process monitoring client requests to its respective server and communicating with the other respective request monitor processes on the other equivalent servers to maintain global request information for the plurality of equivalent servers; said global request information identifying patterns in the client requests made to the plurality of equivalent servers collectively; and each of said data mover processes reallocating the blocks of data of the identified patterns from one server to another server of the plurality of equivalent servers based on operational characteristics of the plurality of equivalent servers and the identified patterns.