CLOUD STORAGE SYSTEM WITH DISTRIBUTED METADATA

A method and system is disclosed for providing a cloud storage system supporting existing APIs and protocols. The method of storing cloud storage system (CSS) object metadata separates object metadata that describes each CSS object as a collection of named chunks with chunk locations specified as a separate part of the metadata. Chunks are identified using globally unique permanent identifiers that are never re-used to identify different chunk payload. While avoiding the bottleneck of a single metadata server, the disclosed system provides ordering guarantees to clients such as guaranteeing access to the most recent version of an object. The disclosed system also provides end-to-end data integrity protection, inline data deduplication, configurable replication, hierarchical storage management and location-aware optimization of chunk storage.