Patent ID: 8402237

Claim:
A method comprising: generating a read-write clone Logical Unit Number (LUN) of a parent LUN; coalescing an identical data instance of the read-write clone LUN and the parent LUN in a data block of a volume of a storage system; modifying a data structure at a block transfer protocol layer level to refer to the read-write clone LUN as a read-only clone LUN; presenting the read-only clone LUN to a host device as a snapshot of the parent LUN; and coalescing the identical data instance of the read-write clone LUN and the parent LUN with a data deduplication operation; wherein the data deduplication operation is a Single Instance Storage (SIS) operation in which unique data blocks of the parent LUN and the read-write clone LUN are stored in the volume of the storage system and a meta-data is created that references the unique data blocks.