Patent ID: 8006049

Claim:
A computer bearing medium tangibly embodying a program of machine-readable instructions executable by a processor to perform operations, the operations comprising: maintaining a source physical volume pool corresponding to a plurality of logical volumes; activating an export clone pool to clone an identity of the source physical volume pool into the export clone pool based on at least one logical volume, wherein the source physical volume pool includes at least one pool rule, wherein the activation of the export clone pool to clone the identity of the source physical volume pool into the export clone pool based on the at least one logical volume includes copying the at least one pool rule of the source physical volume pool to the export clone pool, wherein the at least one pool rule indicates a type of storage device being used, wherein the at least one pool rule indicates data borrowing and data return policies, and wherein the export clone pool and the source physical volume pool are maintained in a first computational device; exporting, from the first computational device to a second computational device, at least some logical volumes of the plurality of logical volumes of the export clone pool including the at least one logical volume subsequent to the activation of the export clone pool, wherein an attempt to export at least one selected logical volume of the plurality of logical volumes from the export control pool causes a failure, wherein the source physical volume pool is configured to be used by the first computational device while the exporting from the export clone pool to the second computational device is being performed; and deactivating the export clone pool to purge the identity of the source physical volume pool from the export clone pool subsequent to the exportation of the export clone pool, and in response to the failure in the export of the at least one selected logical volume from the export control pool, moving the at least one selected logical volume from the export control pool to the source physical volume pool, wherein in response to determining that it is necessary to write export data to scratch volumes and borrow additional scratch volumes from a scratch pool, the export data is written to the scratch volumes and the additional scratch volumes are borrowed from the scratch pool.