Patent ID: 8495112

Claim:
A method for distributed management of a file hierarchy of a clustered file system comprising: accessing a cluster file hierarchy to determine location of a file in response to a request to write to a file, wherein a first node maintains the cluster file hierarchy, wherein the cluster file hierarchy comprises a cluster meta fileset object that references a plurality of fileset objects, wherein each of the plurality of fileset objects represents a logical grouping of files and the cluster meta fileset object represents a logical grouping of filesets corresponding to the plurality of fileset objects; determining that management of a fileset object, which represents a fileset that includes the file, has been delegated to a second node based, at least in part, on said accessing the cluster file hierarchy; accessing a node file hierarchy maintained by the second node, wherein said cluster file hierarchy represents filesets of the clustered file system and the node hierarchy represents a subset of one or more of the filesets; determining location of the file based, at least in part, on said accessing the node file hierarchy wherein said determining location of the file based, at least in part, on said accessing the node file hierarchy comprises, accessing a node meta fileset object, wherein the node meta fileset object points to a set of one or more fileset objects that represent the subset of one or more filesets managed by the second node; dereferencing a pointer in the node meta fileset object to the fileset object; dereferencing a pointer in the fileset object to a file object that represents the file; and dereferencing a set of one or more pointers of the file object to a set of one or more data blocks of the file, wherein the set of one or more data blocks are indicated by the request.