Patent ID: 7082390

Claim:
A system, comprising: one or more host devices; one or more storage controllers connected with the one or more host devices, wherein at least one of the one or more storage controllers is an advanced storage controller further comprising: a host device simulation component capable of connecting with the one or more host devices, wherein the host device simulation component is configured to present one or more physical devices to the one or more host devices via a plurality of host interfaces, maintain a state of each of the one or more host devices and convert host protocol and data from the one or more host devices to internal formats of the one or more physical devices; a physical device component capable of connecting with the one or more physical devices, wherein the physical device component is configured to provide virtualization between the one or more host devices and the one or more physical devices and provide device error recovery; a cache device component connected with the host device simulation component and the physical device component providing cache memory and capable of segmenting the cache memory for use by a specific group of cache devices, the cache device component being configured to emulate the one or more host devices by maintaining at least one of all and a portion of the one or more host devices data in cache memory, initiate staging of data into memory from the one or more physical devices, initiate destaging of data from cache memory that has been modified by the one or more host devices and establish and maintain n-way mirrors, copy sets and snapshot copies of the data provided by the one or more host devices; one or more processing elements and memory elements connected with the host device simulation component, the physical device component and the cache device component; and a management component capable of connecting with the host device simulation component, the physical device component, the cache device component and the one or more processing elements and memory elements, wherein the management component is configured to define and allocate resources amongst the host device simulation component, physical device component and the cache device component and communicate with an operator of the storage controller, wherein the system is configurable and controllable from at least one of a local or a remote location; wherein the cache device component is capable of providing parallel processing functionality to the advanced storage controller.