Unlike other storage systems with a distributed file system, Red Hat Storage does not create, store, or use a separate metadata index. Instead, Red Hat Storage places and locates files algorithmically. All storage node servers in the trusted storage pool can locate any piece of data without looking it up in an index or querying another server. Red Hat Storage uses an elastic hashing algorithm to locate data in the storage pool, removing a common source of I/O bottlenecks and single point of failure. Data access is fully parallelized and performance scales linearly.