12. A method of component reuse in a storage area network defined by a model of entity category templates, each entity category corresponding to a component, comprising: identifying a top-level entity category corresponding to a network element to be deployed, each entity category having an attribute definition including attributes common to components in that entity category; identifying, for each of a set of successive levels in the model from the identified top-level category, ancillary categories corresponding to the attributes of the network element to be deployed; defining, for each of the attributes corresponding to an identified category, attribute values derived from an instantiation of an existing component in the same entity category as the network element to be deployed; and repeating the identifying and defining in an iterative manner for the ancillary categories at successive levels of the model of entity category templates.
13. The method of claim 12 further comprising: determining if there is at least one unassigned attribute value in the attribute values of the network element to be deployed, and if so: defining at least one new entity category containing at least one new attribute definition that corresponds to the at least one unassigned attribute value.