Patent attributes
Copy capability moved into the SAN fabric and provided as a data mover service. A well-known address is utilized to receive copy commands from the hosts. Each switch in the fabric contains a front end or service interface which receives the copy command and manages access control or zoning and LUN mapping. LUN mapping and zoning are based on shared databases. Assuming correct zoning, the service interface will perform any necessary LUN mapping on the received copy command and forward the command to a copy engine to perform the copy operation. The switch service interface also maintains copy operation status, querying the copy engine if necessary, so that any host status requests are also simply handled. Additionally, if multiple copy engines are present, the switches can communicate to perform load balancing.
