MAINTAINING CONSISTENCY OF ASYNCHRONOUS REPLICATION

Maintaining consistency for asynchronous replication of LUNs of a local storage system to corresponding LUNs of a remote storage system includes copying application data written to LUNs to cache slots, copying metadata of LUNs to cache slots, associating a first sequence number to all metadata modifications and all application data writes that are begun after a first time and before a second time, associating a second sequence number, different from the first sequence number, to all metadata modifications and all application data writes that are begun after the second time, and, after completion of all metadata modifications and all application data writes associated with the first sequence number, initiating transfer to the remote storage system of all metadata modifications and all application data writes associated with the first sequence number. Each cache slot may include a field that indicates a corresponding sequence number.