Patent ID: 7650462

Claim:
A storage system comprising: a first storage control apparatus which has first disk drives and is configured with logical volumes provided by storage areas of the first disk drives and configured with a first compression function; and a second storage control apparatus which has second disk drives and is configured with logical volumes provided by storage areas of the second disk drives and configured with a second compression function, wherein the first storage control apparatus is coupled to a host computer and the second storage control apparatus and configured to provide virtual volumes appearing as logical volumes therein to the host computer by mapping the virtual volumes to the logical volumes of the second storage control apparatus and storing write data from the host computer designated to the virtual volumes into the logical volumes of the second storage control apparatus, wherein the first storage control apparatus manages compression management information including virtual volume identifiers corresponding to the virtual volumes, logical volume identifiers corresponding to the logical volumes of the second storage control apparatus, apparatus identifiers indicating which one of the first compression function and the second compression function executes compression of the write data, and compression function execution conditions including load information of the first storage control apparatus and load information of the second storage control apparatus, wherein the first storage control apparatus manages first compression management information, including volume identifiers, addresses of the logical volumes before compression and addresses of the logical volumes after compression, and updates the first compression management information based on reception of the write data, wherein the second storage control apparatus manages second compression management information corresponding to the first compression management information, and updates the second compression management information based on the update of the first compression management information, and wherein after updating of the apparatus identifiers of the compression management information and switching execution of the compression of the write data from the first compression function to the second compression function, the first compression function being different from the second compression function, if the compression function execution conditions are satisfied, the second compression function executes the compression of the write data designated to the virtual volumes with the second compression management information, and stores compressed write data designated to the virtual volumes into the logical volumes thereof.