LOAD BALANCING METHOD FOR EXCHANGING DATA BETWEEN MULTIPLE HOSTS AND STORAGE ENTITIES, IN IP BASED STORAGE AREA NETWORK

The present invention achieves load balancing of activities on storage entities, operating in a storage area network (SAN) by assignment of address to each storage entity. The storage traffic is monitored and statistics are accumulated over an interval and then used to obtain the traffic pattern of each host-storage entity link. A statistical analysis is used to determine the optimal routing map from hosts to storage entity. Other heuristics including genetic algorithms many also be used. This mapping is set on the network by assigning the entities' addresses to the storage gateways, thus does not impose any process on the hosts or the disks.