Patent ID: 7155466

Claim:
In a redundant array of independent nodes, wherein each node comprises given hardware on which a given operating system executes, the given hardware including a processor, a data store coupled to the processor, and a local file system, the improvement comprising: a set of data objects stored in the data store, wherein a given data object is associated with given fixed content data that has been written to the local file system of the node, the given data object encapsulating the given fixed content data together with metadata that includes policy data; and an application instance stored in the data store and executable by the processor on the given node, comprising: file system code that provides access to data objects stored in the local file system of the given node; request manager code that processes requests associated with a given data object; storage manager code that stores the data objects in the local file system of the node; metadata manager code that manages the data objects across a set of cooperating nodes including the given node; and policy manager code that enforces a set of one or more policies against the policy data in the data object's metadata during a life cycle of the archive object.