Patent ID: 7624109

Claim:
A method of maintaining committal of I/O data to achieve distributed asynchronous ordered replication, the method comprising: creating a first journal for a first set of I/O data to be committed to a local storage device, the first journal comprising entries, the entries comprising a first counter value that is the same for all entries of the first journal and the order of entries in the first journal being independent of the order of the first set of I/O data committed to the local storage; creating a second journal for a second set of I/O data to be committed to the local storage device, the second journal comprising entries, the entries comprising a second counter value that is the same for all entries of the second journal and the order of entries in the second journal being independent of the order of the second set of I/O data committed to the local storage; temporarily preventing committal, to the local storage device, of the second set of I/O data until the second journal is created; and beginning committal of the second set of I/O data to the local storage device before the first set of I/O data is finished committal.