Patent ID: 8489808

Claim:
A method for presenting virtual tape products to a client, comprising: connecting via a switching fabric individual host bus adapters (HBAs) at each of a plurality of client operating systems to a storage device, by default the individual HBAs logically disconnected from the storage device, the individual HBAs mapping the respective client operating systems to the storage device to establish a logical connection with the storage device for data access on an as-needed basis; allocating a plurality of disks at the storage device as both virtual tape storage and virtual disk storage; distinguishing at the HBA, between storage allocated as virtual tape storage and storage allocated as virtual disk storage for: translating at the HBA of a logically connected client operating system an input/output (I/O) communication between the client operating system and the plurality of disks to access at least a portion of the plurality of disks allocated as virtual tape storage; and handling all other I/O communication between the client and the plurality of disks at the same HBA for access to the plurality of disks allocated as virtual disk storage.