We present the design and implementation of both an enhanced type of OSD device, the OSD+ device, and a metadata cluster based on it. OSD+s support data objects and directory objects. A directory object stores filenames and attributes, and supports metadata-related operations. OSD+s profit the directory implementation and features of the underlying file systems used by the storage nodes, achieving a great flexibility, simplicity and small overhead. By using OSD+ devices, we show how a metadata cluster can effectively be managed by all the servers in a system, improving the performance, scalability and availability of the metadata service. The performance of our new metadata cluster has been evaluated and compared with Lustre’s. The results show that our proposal obtains a better throughput than Lustre when both use a single metadata server, easily getting improvements of more than 60-80%, and that the performance scales with the number of OSD+s.