Patent ID: 7886186

Claim:
A storage system comprising a plurality of storage apparatuses, wherein each of the storage apparatuses includes: one or more disk drives forming at least one logical unit, and a controller configured to control the disk drives, wherein each controller in the storage apparatuses has a role table where the logical units in the different storage apparatuses are associated with one another and the roles of the logical units are defined, wherein a first controller in a first storage apparatus performs remote copy between its logical unit and a logical unit associated with that logical unit in accordance with the role table, wherein when the first controller detects a failure in the first disk drives under its control, the first controller sends status information about the failure to at least a second storage apparatus from among the plurality of storage apparatuses, wherein a second controller in the second storage apparatus retrieves storage apparatuses capable of providing a logical unit that is a replacement for the first logical unit formed in the first disk drive, selects, from among the retrieved storage apparatuses, a predetermined storage apparatus and sends a creation request to create a logical unit to the selected predetermined storage apparatus, wherein the role table includes a logical unit assigned the role of a primary logical unit, a logical unit assigned the role of a synchronous logical unit to which synchronous remote copy is performed from the primary logical unit and a logical unit assigned the role of an asynchronous logical unit to which asynchronous remote copy is performed from the synchronous logical unit, wherein the second controller receives storage apparatus performance information from the failure-affected storage apparatus, and retrieves a storage apparatus capable of providing a logical unit that is a replacement for the first logical unit based on the received storage apparatus performance information, and wherein when the logical unit in the retrieved storage apparatus associated with the first logical unit is an asynchronous logical unit, the second controller changes the logical unit in the retrieved storage apparatus from the asynchronous logical unit to a synchronous logical unit.