Patent ID: 7194656

Claim:
A method for implementing preferred target selection for read operations by a given AMF in a storage network so that the read operations are directed toward data mirrors associated with that AMF, the network comprising an AMF access group (AAG), including a plurality of AMFs that share read and write access to a plurality of redundancy groups (RGs), wherein each AMF shares read and write access to a local RG (LRG) including a first plurality of storage resources and a remote RG including a second plurality of remote storage resources, the method comprising: defining a hierarchy of read targets for each AMF, said hierarchy having an access priority order of storage resources, with resources in a LRG having higher priority than resources in a remote RG; and in response to a read request received by an AMF, selecting resources for read access from among from the storage resources shared by that AMF as determined by the hierarchy priority order for that AMF.