Patent ID: 8060776

Claim:
A method for invoking mirror voting, comprising: maintaining a main copy of a data set and a mirror copy of the data set, the main copy stored on a first set of storage devices and the mirror copy stored on a second set of storage devices; providing mirror vote records on a mailbox disk associated with each volume or a cluster interconnect; retrieving mirror vote records associated with the main and mirror copies of the data set wherein the mirror vote records contain a count on the total number of data sets and an active number of data sets for a volume, the volume made up of a plurality of storage devices; in the event of a disaster where only one copy remains available, determining, based on mirror vote records, if the available data set copy is most-up-to-date; and if so, bringing the most-up-to-date data set copy online; if the available data set is not the most-up-to-date, marking the data set as out-of-date; marking a volume containing the data set as failed; and restricting the data set from being brought online, and providing said volume containing the failed data set with a new identification, wherein two divergent sets of data are avoided.