Patent ID: 7636814

Claim:
A system comprising: a storage device; a storage consumer configured to generate update requests to write data blocks to the storage device; a write-back cache configured to temporarily store the data blocks in response to the update requests generated by the storage consumer; a storage processing node; and device management software stored on a storage medium and executable to communicate with the storage consumer and the write-back cache, wherein the device management software is further executable to: store a new version of a first data block of the storage device in the write-back cache in response to a first update request from the storage consumer, wherein the new version of the first data block is provided by the storage consumer; send an update completion notification corresponding to the first update request to the storage consumer; read a previous version of the first data block from the storage device and provide the previous version of the first data block to the storage processing node in response to a detection that the write-back cache has reached a first threshold level of dirty data blocks after the update completion notification has been sent to the storage consumer and before the new version of the first data block is stored in the storage device; and overwrite the previous version of the first data block in the storage device with the new version of the first data block after the update completion notification has been sent to the storage consumer and after the previous version of the first data block is provided to the storage processing node.