Abstract: In one embodiment, the invention relates to an adaptive engine for creating provisioning policies and rules for network storage provisioning, which can be driven by service level objectives. The service level objectives can be defined for a given quality of service (“QoS”) for one or more users or user groups, file systems, databases, or applications, or classes of file systems, databases, or applications. In addition, the service level objectives can define the cost, availability, time to provision, recoverability, performance and accessibility objectives for the file system, database or application.