Method for policy-based, autonomically allocated storage

A method for allocating storage in a computer storage system, the method comprising:

• a policy specification step, wherein constraints on resource allocation are specified;
• the constraints being in a form of quality-of-service selection for certain users, applications, and patterns, and/or in a form of constraints upon when and how resources may be allocated including specifying a set of attributes for the quality-of-service;
• a resource-analysis step, wherein available capabilities of the storage system are analyzed, and results of an analysis are saved that includes building a logical model of a storage infrastructure based on configuration information collected via sensors at the time of system initialization;
• a quality-of-service specification step, wherein an allocation request is associated with a given quality-of-service;
• an allocation step, wherein at least some available storage in the computer storage system is allocated based on the allocation request, on policies specified in the policy specification step, responsive to the analysis results saved in the resource-analysis step including the logical model, the quality-of-service specified in the quality-of-service specification step;
• and
• a reallocation step, wherein resources may be reallocated in response to monitoring of the computer system that shows failure of meeting the given quality-of-service, including reading and processing data derived from dynamic sensors.