Patent ID: 8190844

Claim:
A method of issuing volume level alerts that provide a warning that indicates an overutilization of storage resources in a computer system comprising: providing a plurality of pools, each of said pools comprising at least one storage disk; creating a plurality of logical volumes that are assigned storage space such that each volume of said plurality of volumes is assigned space in only one pool of said plurality of pools: calculating a free space ratio for each volume of said plurality of volumes, said free space ratio for each of said plurality of volumes being the sum of all of the unallocated space in the pool to which the volume is assigned divided by the size of the volume; identifying a most problematic volume, said most problematic volume being the volume having the lowest free space ratio; if the most problematic volume is reduced in size, recalculating the free space ratio of all of the volumes that are assigned to the same pool as the most problematic volume and re-identifying a most problematic volume, said most problematic volume being the volume having the lowest free space ratio; if a volume which is not the most problematic volume is expanded in size, recalculating the free space ratio of the volume that has expanded in size, comparing the recalculated free space ratio of the expanded volume with the most problematic volume to determine if the expanded volume is a new most problematic volume, and making the expanded volume the most problematic volume if the expanded volume has a lower free space ration than the most problematic volume; if a new volume is created, calculating the free space ratio for the new volume and comparing the calculated new volume free space ratio to the previous most problematic volume free space ratio to determine a new most problematic volume; and creating the alert whenever the most problematic volume for any of the plurality of pools has a free space ratio that is less than a predetermined level.