Patent ID: 8229899

Claim:
An article of manufacture comprising a non-transitory computer readable medium having computer readable program code embodied therewith to implement a method for maintaining consistency, in a Storage Area Network (SAN), of a local copy of a remote file system sub-tree obtained from a remote source; said medium comprising: a. computer readable program code mapping a directory structure of said remote file system sub-tree to a container; said container attached to said SAN; b. computer readable program code representing each remote object comprising said remote file system sub-tree as a local object component of said container; c. computer readable program code labeling each said local object component with attributes associated with said represented remote object, said attributes comprising both content storage attributes and file attributes, each file attribute comprising at least a time stamp; d. computer readable program code storing metadata comprising both said content storage attributes and said file attributes in a metadata server, said metadata server attached to said SAN and remotely located from said remote file system; e. computer readable program code associating a consistency policy with each said local object component in said container; said policy defining conditions for checking freshness of each said labeled object component that is labeled with said content storage attributes and file attributes; and f. computer readable program code checking said metadata server for freshness of each labeled attribute according to at least an associated time stamp and updating each said local object component of said container in accordance with said consistency policy.