Patent ID: 7730258

Claim:
A method of managing lock state information in a system including a plurality of data volumes of a striped volume set, comprising: connecting two or more nodes together to form a cluster, t each node in the cluster being associated with least one data volume of the plurality of data volumes and each data volume is a logical arrangement of a plurality of storage devices connected to one of the nodes; striping one or more data containers across the plurality of volumes in the striped volume set; configuring a meta-data volume node that includes a lock state database that stores lock state information for one or more data containers on the striped volume set; and communicating the lock state information including an input/output operation result for input/output requests from said meta-data volume node to one or more data volume nodes of the system, using lock state command messages; in response to said meta-data volume receiving a client request to add a new lock to a file in a striped volume environment, consulting at said meta-data volume node, a striping table to determine striping rules for said file; using striping rules from said striping table, and a file range of the new lock being added, and determining at said meta-data volume, which data volume nodes are impacted by the addition of the new lock; and for each such data volume node listed in a list of impacted data volume nodes, performing at said meta-data volume the following: if the new lock overlaps with a byte range with no locks present, or locks which are marked as having been cached by the data volume node in question, then the meta-data volume node sends a message to that data volume node, informing it of the new lock and that the file range covered by the new lock is invalid.