Contents 1 Introduction
Huge storage systems scalable during runtime, demanded by 24[h].7[d] applications, with low administrational costs are of tremendous importance. The sustained increasing consumption and generation of data, especially multimedia documents, emphasizes the importance of scalable, highly available, and fast storage systems. New distributed placement schemes for P2P networks, like [3], [11] are in spite of join and leave operations able to preserve a balanced workload spread with less overhead, in an environment consisting of heterogeneous nodes. Such operations are similar in Storage Area Networks aka. SANs, but they occur less frequently. There, the ongoing growth requires to add or replace devices, whether the device replacements might have different attributes than the original ones. These operations imply massive and thus expansive data movements. So it is eligible that the costs (moved data), to obtain a balanced allocation in the system, after these changes, should be minimal.
