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(57) ABSTRACT A storage area network (SAN)-attached storage system archi tecture is disclosed. The storage system provides strongly consistent distributed storage communication protocol semantics, such as SCSI target semantics. The system includes a mechanism for presenting a single distributed logi cal unit, comprising one or more logical Sub-units, as a single logical unit of storage to a host system by associating each of the logical Sub-units that make up the single distributed logi cal unit with a single host visible identifier that corresponds to the single distributed logical unit. The system further includes mechanisms to maintain consistent context information for each of the logical Sub-units such that the logical Sub-units are not visible to a host system as separate entities from the single distributed logical unit.