The present invention provides techniques for creation, operation,
management, and access control of network-based storage services.
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),
application 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.