Patent ID: 8055866

Claim:
A mirrored storage system for applications, wherein an application accesses said mirrored storage system via a network, said mirrored storage system comprising: a first storage system and at least a second storage system, wherein said first storage system and said second storage system are connected via at least one mirror link; an application response module which provides a respective application response responsive to each of a plurality of application write commands, each application write command issued by a respective application of a plurality of applications accessing said mirrored storage system, each said application having a respective configurable time-varying Recovery Point Objective (RPO); a mirror observation module, observing said mirror link and retrieving mirror state information; and a policy module communicating with said mirror observation module and said application response module and having access to the respective configurable time-varying RPO of each of the applications accessing said mirrored storage system, wherein said policy module generates the respective application response corresponding to each of a plurality of application write commands, each respective application response being based on the actual mirror state information and the respective RPO requirement of the respective application which issued the corresponding application write command set for the current time of the respective application write command; wherein the respective application response specifies whether to accept the corresponding application write command.