With the arrival of gigabit and multi-gigabit network technology, storing, accessing and sharing large volumes of data over a network has become more and more efficient. For instance, a single Gigabit Ethernet or FibreChannel connection is capable of communicating data at a rate of up to 240 Megabytes/second (MB/s), which is even faster than most locally attached storage devices. As a result, many users can store and manipulate their data in an aggregated file system that is located remotely and managed by professional system administrators. In order to ensure a smooth and secure operation of the aggregated file system, however, a large amount of metadata needs to be stored and accessed. The volume of metadata and volume of access requests to the metadata may exceed capability of a single metadata server. There is a need, therefore, for an improved aggregated file system for managing large amounts of metadata.