Patent attributes
High priority host applications are protected from data loss associated with failure of multiple drives associated with the same protection group by preemptively relocating associated host application image data to protections groups that do not have failed drives. New storage allocations for the high priority host applications are preferentially located on protections groups that do not have failed drives. Following replacement of the failed drive, the preemptively relocated data and new allocations are redistributed across protection groups in a balanced manner. Protection groups are characterized as targets, sources, or neutral based on allocations of high priority host application image data relative to other protection groups. Sources and paired with targets and portions of the high priority host application image data are iteratively relocated until all protection groups are neutral.
