Controlling access to a storage device

Controlling access to a data storage device (W, X, Y, Z) includes defining a plurality of groups (Q, R, S, T, V) that access the data storage device (W, X, Y, Z), defining a plurality of pools of devices of the data storage device (W, X, Y, Z), and, for at least one of the groups (Q, R, S, T, V), determining access rights with respect to at least one of the pools. The pools of devices (W, X, Y, Z) may include communication ports and/or memory segments of the storage element. The access rights may indicate whether system calls are allowed on the communication ports. In some embodiments, restricting access to a data storage device includes coupling each of a plurality of host requestor systems to the storage element by one of a plurality of ports provided for the storage element and selectively determining, for each of the ports, whether system calls are allowed, where, for the ports in which system calls are not allowed, a system call by the host systems coupled thereto causes the storage element to indicate that the system call was not performed. In other embodiments, the access to pools of memory resources having a unique ID number is restricted to requestors having unique ID numbers in a data base that matches allowed requestors and request types to allowed pools of memory.