US Patent 9020900 Distributed deduplicated storage system

A distributed, deduplicated storage system according to certain embodiments is arranged in a parallel configuration including multiple deduplication nodes. Deduplicated data is distributed across the deduplication nodes. The deduplication nodes can be networked together and communicate with one another according using a light-weight, customized communication scheme (e.g., a scheme based on FTP or HTTP). In some cases, deduplication management information including deduplication signatures and/or other metadata is stored separately from the deduplicated data in deduplication management nodes, improving performance and scalability.