Patent ID: 7657537

Claim:
A method for operating a computer data storage system, comprising: connecting a plurality of network interfaces with a computer network to exchange messages with one or more clients connected to the computer network; connecting a plurality of interfaces to data storage devices to a plurality of data storage devices; connecting both the plurality of network interfaces and the plurality of interfaces to data storage devices to a cluster switching fabric; establishing, through the cluster switching fabric, a communications session between a selected network interface of the plurality of network interfaces and a selected interface to a data storage device of the plurality of interfaces to data storage devices; establishing for the session a plurality of connections through the cluster switching fabric between the selected network interface and the selected interface to a data storage device, each connection having established a conventional transport protocol; receiving a plurality of requests from a client of the one or more clients, each request of the plurality of requests having assigned a unique sequence number, each request being an input/output request to a selected data storage device connected to the selected interface to a data storage device; dividing the plurality of requests into a plurality of subsets of requests; assigning a batch number to each subset of requests, the batch numbers increasing monotonically so that each subset of requests is assigned a unique batch number; executing a first subset of requests in arbitrary order over the plurality of connections in response to a first batch number; and executing a second subset of requests in response to a second batch number after execution of all of the first subset of requests have completed.