Patent attributes
A management control center communicates with multiple agents in a storage area network. On behalf of the management control center, the agents communicate with a switch resource management entity that maintains configuration information about resources such as a group or groups of switches in the storage area network. Based on a chain of communications from the management control center through the agents to the remote management entity, the management control center can indirectly learn about a configuration of switch resources in the storage area network. The agent utilizes a calculated current load value (e.g., a value indicating a relative burden placed on the remote management entity to service the forwarded set of requests) to selectively forwards requests to the switch resource management entity. This technique ensures that the switch resource management entity is not overwhelmed by a task of servicing too many requests at the same time.
