US Patent 7484059 Full array non-disruptive migration of extended storage functionality

Described are systems and methods of migrating data and metadata from a source storage array to a destination storage array transparently with respect to a storage application executing on a host. The storage application provides particular storage functionality at the source storage array while using metadata during its execution. During a data migration event in which data resident in disks at the source storage array are fully copied to the destination storage array, metadata stored at the source storage array are copied to the destination storage array. After the data migration event, the destination storage array assumes the personality of the source storage array.