Patent ID: 9565254
Date: 2017-02-07
CPC Classifications: G06F,H04L

Claim:
1. A method comprising: providing, by a computing device, a layer of indirection between storage locations of data objects and path names of the data objects so that the path names of the data objects are independent of the storage locations of the data objects; receiving, by the computing device, a request from a client device to access a particular one of the data objects, the request comprising one of the path names of the particular data object; obtaining, by the computing device, a location-independent object identifier of the particular data object from a path namespace using the path name of the particular data object, wherein the path namespace includes a mapping between the path names of the data objects and corresponding location-independent object identifiers of the data objects; locating, by the computing device, the particular data object using the location-independent object identifier of the particular data object to look up a location identifier of the particular data object in a multi-level hierarchical mapping structure, wherein different portions of the location-independent object identifier are used to identify respective entries in different levels of the multi-level hierarchical mapping structure; and accessing, by the computing device, the particular data object using the location identifier and returning a response to the client device, wherein the response is based on a type of the request to access the particular data object received from the client device.