Patent ID: 7266652

Claim:
In a data storage environment having a first set of data storage volumes and a second set of data storage volumes being stored on one or more data storage systems, and production data being stored on the first set of data storage volumes, and a copy of the data denominated as the data copy being stored on the second data storage volumes, a method for maintaining consistency between the first and second data storage volumes, when data is copied from the first data storage volumes to the second data storage volumes in the data storage environment, the method comprising the steps of: in response to an incremental copy being performed while an administrative operation is being performed on the first data storage system, arresting processing of I/O traffic between the first and second data storage volumes; queuing any I/O's that follow the arresting of the processing in a queuing data structure; and processing each I/O from the queuing data structure until the I/O processing is complete.