Techniques for creation, operation, management, and access control of
network-based storage services are described. Specific embodiments
provide improved efficiency of the service management tasks used for
designing, operating and accounting the robust and profitable network
services, for example. In representative embodiments, techniques for
constructing integrated network and storage services are provided. In a
specific embodiment, the service comprises of three major service
components: virtual private networks (VPN), applications servers and
storage area networks (SAN). Each of these service components has its own
customer identification information, such as VPN identifier for VPN
services, process identifier for application servers and logical unit
number (LUN) for storage devices.