11952091

Paragraph Number

57

The storage devices 150a-n may be networked together and act as a distributed storage device. The storage device 150a coupled to the requesting device 155 controls object requests to the distributed storage device. In one embodiment, the storage devices 150 and associated storage controllers 152 manage objects and appear to the requesting device(s) 155 as a distributed object file system. In this context, a parallel object file system is an example of a type of distributed object file system. In another embodiment, the storage devices 150 and associated storage controllers 152 manage objects and appear to the requesting device 155 as distributed object file servers. In this context, a parallel object file server is an example of a type of distributed object file server. In these and other embodiments the requesting device 155 may exclusively manage objects or participate in managing objects in conjunction with storage devices 150; this typically does not limit the ability of storage devices 150 to fully manage objects for other clients 114. In the degenerate case, each distributed storage device, distributed object file system and distributed object file server can operate independently as a single device. The networked storage devices 150a-n may operate as distributed storage devices, distributed object file systems, distributed object file servers, and any combination thereof having images of one or more of these capabilities configured for one or more requesting devices 155. For example, the storage devices 150 may be configured to operate as distributed storage devices for a first requesting device 155a, while operating as distributed storage devices and distributed object file systems for requesting devices 155b. Where the system 101 includes one storage device 150a, the storage controller 152a of the storage device 150a manages objects may appear to the requesting device(s) 155 as an object file system or an object file server.

Added by DJM 3 2021