A system facilitates access to data in a network. One implementations includes a caching layer function that is configured to integrate into a local cluster file system, to cache local file data in a cache based on fetching file data on demand from a remote cluster file system, and to operate on a multi-node cache cluster. The cache is visible to file system clients as a Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) compliant file system, applications execute on the multi-node cache cluster using POSIX semantics via a POSIX compliant file system interface, and data cache is locally consistent for updates made at the multi-node cache cluster using distributed locking for the data cache.