Patent ID: 8135929

Claim:
A cascaded remote data facility (RDF) system, comprising: a local RDF site coupled to a source of data; a remote RDF site; and at least one intermediate RDF site, interposed between the local RDF site and the remote RDF site, wherein data written by the source of data to the local RDF site is propagated through the at least one intermediate RDF site to be stored at the remote RDF site, wherein the at least one intermediate RDF site includes a diskless storage device that does not have a non-volatile disk storage memory, and wherein the data is stored on a volatile memory of the at least one intermediate RDF site and transmitted from the volatile memory to the remote RDF site, wherein the at least one intermediate RDF site provides logical storage device functionality to store the received data in the volatile memory, separate from the diskless storage device, and to transmit the data to the remote RDF site without storing the data in non-volatile memory of the at least one intermediate RDF site, and wherein the logical storage device functionality includes addressing tracks, blocks, and cylinders of logical storage devices of the diskless storage device.