Patent 7228369 was granted and assigned to Hitachi on June, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Plural clusters are interconnected by two full-duplex communication paths. When a cluster 10A receives a read request from a host computer 2, and data represented by the read request are stored in another cluster 10B, a processor unit 6 of the cluster 10A uses, for the path used by a control packet sent to the other cluster 10B, the same path used by a read user data packet that is a user data packet transferred from the other cluster 10B to the cluster 10A.