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.