Abstract: The invention discloses an apparatus for storage of data in a distributed storage environment and a method of efficiently storing data in such an environment which includes a set of client nodes, a set of storage nodes, meta data nodes and an administrator node, each node having processing and memory capability. The client nodes can directly access data files stored in the form of “stripes” across the storage nodes without querying the meta data node by using specially created file identifiers and storage identifiers.