1. A method comprising: maintaining, by a metadata server of a system, storage assignment mappings for the system in non-persistent storage, the storage assignment mappings associating servers of the system with storage assignments, the storage assignments representing the data of the system stored on the associated servers; and responsive to a metadata server failure, recovering, by the metadata server, the storage assignment mappings by receiving the storage assignments from the servers and rebuilding the storage assignment mappings from the received storage assignments.