Patent ID: 8145865

Claim:
A method of managing data transferred from a local storage device to a remote storage device, comprising: maintaining the data in chunks in cache memory, wherein data writes to the local storage device begun during a particular time interval are associated with a chunk of data that is separate from other chunks of data and wherein data is transferred from the local storage device to the remote storage device by transferring a particular chunk after all data writes associated with the particular chunk have completed at the local storage device and after a previous chunk has been acknowledged as being received by the remote storage device; and in response to an amount of data in the cache memory exceeding a first threshold, storing data from a first chunk of the cache memory to a logical device of the local storage device that is specifically allocated to receive data stored from the cache memory, wherein data from the first chunk is not stored to the logical device when the amount of the data in the cache memory is less than the first threshold.