Patent 7984259 was granted and assigned to NetApp on July, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The present invention provides a system, method, and computer program product for reducing load imbalance in a storage system having a plurality of storage devices organized in one or more RAIDs for storing data by moving data from heavily-loaded storage devices to less-loaded storage devices during normal data access operations. As a result of moving data to less-loaded storage devices, the service latency of those storage devices decreases, thereby optimizing the system's performance.