be determined if the estimated load on storage hierarchy by the selected master copy can be accommodated fig5 is a flow chart 500 illustrating a process for measuring the load on the storage pool from the duplicate data items as noted above the variable n is employed to identify the number of duplicate data items 502 and the variable i is employed as a counting variable 504 initially the counting variable i is set to the integer one 506 x i is identified as the storage pool in a storage hierarchy where duplicate data item d i resides 508 w i is employed to denote the workload demand for duplicate data item d i 510 in one embodiment a storage monitoring tool is employed to track the number of read requests for each copy of each duplicate item in each storage pool following step 510 the variable tier i j is assigned as the internal nodes of the storage hierarchy that occur on the path from the root of the controller to the storage pool i e the tier of the storage hierarchy an example storage hierarchy is shown in detail in fig3 however it should be noted that the storage hierarchy is identified in fig3 with four tiers in one embodiment the storage hierarchy may include more tiers or fewer tiers each depending upon the configuration of the storage hierarchy as defined above the variable i is a counting variable which cannot exceed the fixed integer.