ON DEMAND, NON-CAPACITY BASED PROCESS, APPARATUS AND COMPUTER PROGRAM TO DETERMINE MAINTENANCE FEES FOR DISK DATA STORAGE SYSTEM

摘要

In accordance with one aspect of the present invention, in order to perform the operations for determining a maintenance fee for a data storage system, a program of machine-readable instructions executable by a digital processing apparatus provides a signal bearing medium tangibly embodies. The operation includes the operation of determining the current value of the maintenance fee based on the determined duty cycle, the duty cycle of the operation and, at least in part to determine to monitor at least one data storage device during operation of the data storage system. In a further disk drive-based embodiment the operations may include an operation of determining a disk drive redundancy configuration of disk drives of a data storage system in addition to or instead. The operation is then, comparing the determined duty cycle to a threshold value, and assert a redundancy configuration change signal based on the comparison result. If a RAID configuration embodiment having a RAID level, the operation of the go bit asserts a RAID level change signal based on the result of the comparison.