Patent ID: 8903775

Claim:
A method, comprising: maintaining, in at least one computer readable storage device, copy relationships associating source storage and target storage pairs for a plurality of source storages and target storages, wherein writes received at one of the source storages are transferred to the associated one of the target storages, and wherein multiple of the source storage and target storage pairs are maintained by control units; calculating a receive signal interval as a function of information from the control units; determining whether a signal has been received from a consistency manager managing data consistency across the multiple source storage and target storage pairs maintained by the control units within the receive signal interval; initiating a freeze operation to cease receiving writes at the source storages from an application in response to determining that the signal has not been received within the receive signal interval; and initiating a thaw operation to continue receiving writes submitted by the application at the source storages without transferring the writes from the application to the associated target storages after a lapse of a freeze timeout following the freeze operation to maintain data consistency at the target storages of the source storage and target storage pairs.