Abstract: A management control center communicates with multiple agents in a storage area network. On behalf of the management control center, the agents communicate with a switch resource management entity that maintains configuration information about resources such as a group or groups of switches in the storage area network. Based on a chain of communications from the management control center through the agents to the remote management entity, the management control center can indirectly learn about a configuration of switch resources in the storage area network. The agent utilizes a calculated current load value (e.g., a value indicating a relative burden placed on the remote management entity to service the forwarded set of requests) to selectively forwards requests to the switch resource management entity. This technique ensures that the switch resource management entity is not overwhelmed by a task of servicing too many requests at the same time.

Abstract: An agent in a storage area network communicates with a management entity in the storage area network to discover a group of resources in the storage area network controlled by the management entity. In response to discovering the group of resources, the agent associates member resources (e.g., and their respective names) of the group of resources to a corresponding group identifier to which the member resources belong. The agent reports i) the corresponding group identifier and ii) the member resources of the group of resources controlled by the management entity to a management control center that assigns one of multiple agents in the storage area network to manage the group of resources based on communications with the management entity. After a step of assigning, the management control center can initiate an assigned agent to control the group of resources.

Abstract: A system can analyze an application programming interface definition to automatically produce software string generator and parser software components allowing remote access to functions within the application programming interface definition by processes that are not natively compatible with the computing system environment in which the application programming interface operates. A first string generator processes can produce an encapsulated function call from a first process, such as a Java-based process, that calls a first function in a first computing environment. A second parser process operates in a second computing environment to receive the encapsulated function call and to invoke a second function call in a second process, such as a C-based process. Results from the second function call are returned to a second string generator which produces an encapsulated response that is returned to a first parser process.