Patent ID: 8185715

Claim:
A method comprising: providing a cluster of a plurality of storage platforms that are operationally coupled to a plurality of storage devices and to a plurality of client computing systems; wherein each storage platform presents virtual storage to a client computing system and appears as a virtual computing system to a storage device for providing virtualization services to the client computing system and the storage device; and wherein one of the storage platforms includes a centralized metadata controller for managing metadata for the plurality of storage platforms; a data processing agent operating in another of the storage platforms requesting a memory chunk for storing metadata; the centralized metadata controller for the plurality of storage platforms operating in the one of the storage platforms receiving the request for the memory chunk; the centralized metadata controller determining the memory chunk size and allocating the memory chunk from a pool of memory chunks managed by the centralized metadata controller; the centralized metadata controller assigning the allocated memory chunk to a virtualization mapping object of the storage platform executing the data processing agent that requested the memory chunk; and the data processing agent of the another storage platform obtains control of the allocated memory chunk and populates the memory chunk with metadata.