In illustrative embodiments, the host devices 102 also comprise respective multipath devices 113-1, 113-2, . . . 113-N. Multipath devices 113 are logical devices that comprise information on one or more paths from a host device 102 to a corresponding logical volume such as, e.g., a LUN, of a storage device 106. The individual block devices representing each path are known as native devices. For example, the MPIO drivers 112 group the information on all paths, e.g., native devices, from a host device 102 to a corresponding logical volume into a multipath device 113 for that logical volume. An MPIO driver 112 routes received IO operations from the host device 102 to the corresponding logical volume according to the information found in the multipath device 113 corresponding to that logical volume. In some embodiments, a multipath device 113 may be included as part of a respective MPIO driver 112 of a host device 102. In some embodiments, the multipath device 113 may be implemented separately from an MPIO driver 112 of a host device 102 or may be implemented on a host device 102 that does not include an MPIO driver 112.

Applications use a multipath device for submitting IO operations to the SAN 104 so that the IO operations may be distributed across all available paths. When paths fail, the MPIO driver will typically redirect the IO operations to other alive paths in the multipath device.