One processor (20) of a multiprocessor or distributed system is designated as the owner of the shared storage. The remaining processors of the multiprocessor system are designated as requestor processors (10,30). The shared storage (60,70), typically several disk drive units, are connected to a storage controller (40). The storage controller is connected to all of the processors via a communications bus (80).
The shared storage is dynamically segmented into containers of storage space (A1,...,A3M). A container can vary in size and even can be split up among more than one disk drive unit. A container located on one disk drive unit can also be duplicated, or mirrored, on a different disk drive unit. The owner processor maintains a container map (50) in its dedicated non-volatile storage. The container map contains fields that keep track of the physical location of a container, a use count, a key, and container attributes.