The present invention provides selective migration in a storage network in accordance with a policy. The policy can include rules that establish which objects are migrated from a source file server to a destination file server based on file attributes (e.g., file type, file size, last access time, frequency of access). For example, large multimedia files that consume I/O bandwidth on expensive or critical file servers, without adding much value to enterprise productivity, can be migrated to a commodity or less critical file server.