US Patent 11068181 Generating and storing monotonically-increasing generation identifiers

A data storage system in which a transaction is generated that indicates at least one data block of a logical volume to be written to non-volatile data storage of a data, and in which the logical volume is accessible to multiple nodes in the data storage system. A system-wide lock is obtained for each data block indicated by the transaction. A new generation identifier is then created that is equal to a last transaction identifier that was created and stored during processing of a previously completed transaction. Each data block indicated by the transaction is stored into the non-volatile data storage of the data storage system together with the new generation identifier and the last transaction identifier is updated before each system-wide lock on each data block indicated by the transaction is released.