Patent ID: 7231491

Claim:
A storage system, comprising: a plurality of interface control devices each of which is coupled to a client computer; and a plurality of disk devices coupled to said plurality of interface control devices; wherein storage areas in said plurality of disk devices are divided into a plurality of pools based on characteristic of said storage areas, at least one storage area in one of the pools being assigned to each of said interface control devices, each storage area in said plurality of pools being accessed via the interface control device to which the storage area is assigned; wherein one of said interface control devices is a channel adapter board of a file I/O interface and another one of said interface control devices is a channel adapter board of a block I/O interface; wherein said at least one storage area includes a first storage area and a second storage area, the first storage area being provided to a first client computer via the channel adapter board of a block I/O interface and the second storage area being provided to a second client computer via the channel adapter board of a file I/O interface; and wherein a first memory unit is further provided in the storage system for storing disk pool information indicating an assignment of a storage area to each interface control device, said each interface control device including a second memory unit, wherein said each interface control device obtains information about the storage area assigned to the interface control device and stores the obtained information on said second memory unit so as to refer to said information when accessing said assigned storage area.