Patent ID: 8429341

Claim:
A system for responding to file system requests received from a network having file IDs comprising V, a volume identifier specifying the file system being accessed, and R, an integer, specifying the file within the file system being accessed comprising: a file server comprising: D disk elements in which files are stored, where D is greater than or equal to 1 and is an integer; a switching fabric connected to the D disk elements to route requests to a corresponding disk element; and N network elements connected to the switching fabric, each network element having a mapping function that for every value of V, specifies one or more elements from the set D that store the data specified by volume V, where N is greater than or equal to 1 and is an integer and N +D is greater than or equal to 3, which receives the requests from the network and causes the switching fabric to route the requests by their file ID according to the mapping function to the D disk elements.