Patent ID: 8200643

Claim:
A method for lock management, comprising: under control of a lock manager that manages lock requests received from one or more multi-vendor clients and directed to one or more multi-vendor locking agents and manages responses from the one or more multi-vendor locking agents to the one or more multi-vendor clients, receiving lock requests from a locking aware client among the multi-vendor clients; determining that the lock requests have been refused by the one or more multi-vendor locking agents; and for the locking aware client, performing lock request queuing for the lock requests; and under control of a locking aware agent, receiving a request to access a resource from a locking unaware client among the multi-vendor clients, wherein the locking unaware client does not perform locking; determining whether the locking aware agent can access the device; and in response to determining that the locking aware agent can access the device, obtaining a lock to execute the request; releasing the lock when the request has been executed; and notifying the lock manager that the resource is available for locking.