Patent ID: 8843917

Claim:
A method of performing a firmware update of physical drives in a data storage system comprising: receiving, by a drive management object of a storage processor of the data storage system, a first request to perform a firmware update to physical drives of the data storage system; determining, by the drive management object in accordance with criteria included in the first request, one or more physical drives matching the criteria thereby identifying the one or more physical drives as physical drives having firmware to be updated; sending, by the drive management object to each of one or more provision drive objects corresponding to the one or more physical drives, a second request to update firmware on said one or more physical drives; performing firmware update processing independently for each of the one or more physical drives, each of the one or more provision drive objects associated with one of the physical drives, said firmware update processing for said one physical drive including: determining, by said each provision drive object associated with the one physical drive, whether to perform the firmware update to the one physical drive at a current point in time; in response to determining to perform the firmware update to the one physical drive at the current point in time, performing preparation processing in connection with preparing for updating the firmware on the one physical drive, the preparation processing further including holding any new incoming input/output (I/O) operations for the one physical drive and completing any in-progress I/O operations for the one physical drive; notifying, by said each provision drive object upon completion of said preparation processing, a physical drive object associated with said one physical drive to download the firmware update to the one physical drive; and resuming I/O operations to the one physical drive upon successfully completing the firmware update to the one physical drive.