Patent ID: 8468521

Claim:
A system configured to employ a virtualized compute cluster as an execution engine for a storage system node, the system comprising: a first portion of a storage operating system executing on the storage system node, the first portion of the storage operating system ported as a virtual machine from the storage system node to a client of the virtualized compute cluster to utilize available processing bandwidth of the virtualized compute cluster, wherein the first portion of the storage operating system is a network module embodied as a network-facing portion of the storage operating system that terminates a network connection for a network access request using a data access protocol; and a second portion of the storage operating system executing on the storage system node configured to service a data access request generated by an instance of the ported virtual machine, wherein servicing the data access request includes forwarding the data access request to the second portion of the storage operating system, wherein the data access request corresponds to the network access request, wherein the first portion of the storage operating system is configured to cache data from service of the data access request, wherein the first portion of the storage operating system is configured to use a cache coherency policy to cache the data from service of the data access request, and wherein the first portion of the storage operating system is configured to return the cached data in response to the network access request.