Patent ID: 8856589

Claim:
A system for protecting against failures in a plurality of storage area networks including a plurality of data storage volumes and one or more hosts, wherein the volumes are in a storage network in the storage area networks, the system comprising: one or more processors in communication with network connectivity capability for the storage network, wherein the one or more processors include program logic for carrying out failure protection by virtualizing data storage volumes and providing more than one virtualization service that can be related to each virtualized data storage volume, so that, in the event of a failure of virtualization service, another virtualization service can substitute for the failed virtualization service and virtualized data storage volumes may be associated with the substituted virtualization service; wherein the more than one virtualization services enable virtual Storage Area Networks (SAN)s by parsing between front-end SANs and back-end SANs regardless of physical configuration of the SANs, to enable mapping from virtual volumes to back-end storage elements across virtual SANs.