Patent ID: 7437530

Claim:
A method for translating a file based data access request to a computer storage system, comprising: receiving at a network interface the file based data read request from a client, the network interface attached to a wide area computer network (WAN); writing the file based data read request to a virtual disk which appears to the client as a file based storage device; writing the file based data read request from the virtual disk to a block based file system of the storage system; maintaining a mapping of the file block numbers to a set of logical block addresses of a storage medium by the computer data storage system, the maintaining done with the client not having knowledge of a layout of the storage medium; mapping the file based data read request into block based block access addresses in response to the mapping of the file block numbers to a set of logical block addresses of the storage medium; accessing data requested by the file based data read request from block based storage devices in response to the block access numbers; transferring the data requested to the network interface, and sending the data to the client over the WAN.