Patent ID: 8135980

Claim:
A method of maintaining data connectivity in a secure storage network, the method comprising: assigning a volume to a primary secure storage appliance located in a secure data storage network, the secure data storage network including a plurality of secure data paths between the primary secure storage appliance and a client device and a plurality of secure data paths between the secure storage appliance and a plurality of storage systems, the volume corresponding to physical storage at each of the plurality of storage systems; detecting a connectivity problem on at least one of the secure data paths; and assessing whether to reassign the volume to a different secure storage appliance based upon the connectivity problem; wherein the plurality of secure data paths encrypt data transmitted over each of the plurality of secure data paths using different encryption keys; and the data transmitted over each of the plurality of secure data paths corresponds to a different portion of the data being transmitted between the primary secure storage appliance and the client device.