High availability for a fibre channel switch in a storage area network can
be implemented using redundant supervisors. An active supervisor can
identify high availability characteristics associated with a message and
determine whether the message should be mirrored onto a redundant
supervisor, logged, and/or made persistent. Messages can be logged in a
pending transaction buffer and stored using persistent storage services.
Mirroring can be performed using synchronization queues that allow
messages to be passed asynchronously to a redundant supervisor while
maintaining full synchronization between supervisors and causing little
delay to operation of the active supervisor.