Emc Corporation

Daniel D Castel

Natan Vishlitzky

Moshe Yanai

Bruno Alterescu

Gadi G Shklarsky

Yuval Y Ofek

Two data storage systems are interconnected by a data link for remote mirroring of data. Each volume of data is configured as local, primary in a remotely mirrored volume pair, or secondary in a remotely mirrored volume pair. Normally, a host computer directly accesses either a local or a primary volume, and data written to a primary volume is automatically sent over the link to a corresponding secondary volume. Each remotely mirrored volume pair can operate in a selected synchronization mode including synchronous, semi-synchronous, adaptive copy - remote write pending, and adaptive copy - disk. Direct write access to a secondary volume is denied if a 'sync required' attribute is set for the volume and the volume is not synchronized. If a 'volume domino' mode is enabled for a remotely mirrored volume pair, access to a volume of the pair is denied when the other volume is inaccessible. In a 'links domino' mode, access to all remotely mirrored volumes is denied when remote mirroring is disrupted by an all-links failure. The domino modes can be used to initiate application-based recovery, for example, recovering a secondary data file using a secondary log file. In an active migration mode, host processing of a primary volume is concurrent with migration to a secondary volume. In an overwrite cache mode, remote write-pending data in cache can be overwritten. Write data for an entire host channel command word chain is bundled in one link transmission.

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Framingham, MA, United States of America

Daniel D Castel