US Patent 7509316 Techniques for performing policy automated operations

Techniques for automatically performing various data and storage management operations in a storage environment. The operations to be performed are automatically determined based upon policies configured for the data and storage environment. For a selected operation, one or more files on which the operation is to be performed are also automatically determined. The one or more files may be selected using different techniques based upon characteristics of the files and also based upon the operation to be performed. Target storage units, if need for the operation, are also automatically determined. The operations are then performed on the selected files. Examples of policy-driven operations include copying a file, moving a file, deleting a file, archiving a file, backing-up a file, restoring a file, migrating a file, recalling a file, etc.