Abstract: An intelligent data management utility is disposed between a storage system and a data source to automatically and transparently initiate appropriate data management operations without interfering with normal data flow between the data source and the storage system. According to one embodiment, the intelligent data management utility resides within a storage controller and includes a mechanism for intercepting events, such as file activity. Based upon the file activity (e.g., file creation, file open, file read, file write, file close, and the like), the intelligent data management utility invokes one or more appropriate data management applications using a tightly-coupled transport and policy store. The transport queries the policy store for actions to be performed and invokes the appropriate data management application or applications. Upon completion of the data management tasks, status is returned through the transport to the file system filter.

Abstract: The intelligent data storage manager functions to optimize the data storage utilization in a RAID data storage subsystem that is equipped with a heterogeneous mix of data storage elements. This is accomplished by using preference groups and biasing the writing of stripes of data in the redundancy groups of the RAID system to the disk drive or a set of disk drives in the preference group that have the greatest available data storage capacity. This ensures that the data storage capacity of the the disk drive with the largest available capacity is utilized to the maximum capacity. A preference group comprises a group of disk drives that is larger than the stripe size that is used to store data in a RAID format. The data storage manager does not write data across all of the disk drives in the preference group at a time, but rotates the collection of disk drives that are used to write a stripe of data.