Patent ID: 7272666

Claim:
A storage management device, comprising: a plurality of I/O processing modules for accessing units of storage by specifying an address and a time, each of the plurality of I/O processing modules subscribing to process I/O requests for a specified plurality of units of storage and comprising: a target mode driver in communication with a host for receiving the I/O requests; a data classifier in communication with the target mode driver for classifying the received I/O requests according to the subscription associating the processing module with the specified plurality of units of storage and extracting control information associated with the requests; at least one I/O manager in communication with the data classifiers of the processing modules, the at least one I/O manager processing the extracted control information; and a physical store interface in communication with the I/O managers of the processing modules, the physical store interface for communicating with at least one physical store in response to the processed control information; and an internal network for communication among the plurality of I/O processing modules, wherein each write request from the host triggers a copy-on-write operation by at least one of the plurality of I/O processing modules, and wherein at least a portion of the control information extracted from the write request is recorded with a timestamp.