The technique introduced here includes generating a data structure for use in determining how responsibilities for services should be distributed amongst a plurality of resources in a network storage system. The technique includes an iterative process of optimizing the data structure for a plurality of performance/quality metrics, such as evenness of storage consumption across the storage system or a designated subset thereof, number of “hot spots”, degree of data scatter, and number of changes needed to reflect a change in storage system geometry. The data structure can be a striping table for striping logical containers of data across multiple storage resources, such as data volumes, or physical storage devices. The “responsibilities for services”, can include responsibility for storing a stripe of a logical container of data or responsibility for storing a segment of parity data for a logical container of data.