Patent ID: 8868797

Claim:
A method for discovering physical device dependencies between logical devices comprising: receiving, for a plurality of logical devices of a data storage system, a set of baseline response times obtained when issuing data operations to the plurality of logical devices, each of said plurality of logical devices having storage provisioned on one or more physical devices; selecting a first of the plurality of logical devices, wherein a remaining set of logical devices includes each of the plurality of logical devices other than the first logical device; issuing data operations to the first logical device at a first rate while also issuing data operations to each logical device of the remaining set, wherein said first rate is sufficient to result in a first observed response time for the first logical device that is significantly more than a corresponding one of the baseline response times for the first logical device, and wherein said first rate is sufficient to result in an observed response time for each logical device of the remaining set having a portion of data stored on a same physical device as a portion of data of the first logical device whereby the observed response time for said each logical device of the remaining set is significantly more than a corresponding one of the baseline response times for said each logical device; receiving a set of observed response times for the remaining set of logical devices; determining, for each logical device of the remaining set of logical devices, whether said each logical device has a corresponding one of the observed response times of the set that is significantly more than a corresponding one of the baseline response times for said each logical device; and determining a first logical device set of one or more logical devices having physical device dependencies, said first logical device set including the first logical device and each logical device of the remaining set determined to have a corresponding observed response time of the set of observed response times that is significantly greater than a corresponding one of the baseline response times for said each logical device.