Patent ID: 7039766

Claim:
A method for scheduling prefetches into a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache of a data storage system, the method comprising: remotely modeling dynamic operation of the LRU cache in a model, the model including a model of data elements currently stored within the LRU cache; assigning a priority value to modeled data elements according to their history; assigning a priority value to a requested data element based at least partially on whether a preceding data element is present in the LRU cache; making a cache management decision based upon the model comprising; intercepting a request for a data element from a stream of Input/Output (I/O) data requests sent from a host and addressed to the LRU cache; and determining whether to schedule a prefetch of a data element logically successive to the requested data element in accordance with contents of the LRU cache as indicated by the remote model; and executing prefetches into the LRU cache in response to select cache management decisions.