With data volumes increasing at a high rate and the emergence of highly scalable infrastructures (cloud computing, petascale computing), distributed management of data becomes a crucial issue that faces many challenges. This thesis brings several contributions in order to address such challenges. First, it proposes a set of principles for designing highly scalable distributed storage systems that are optimized for heavy data access concurrency. In particular, it highlights the potentially large benefits of using versioning in this context. Second, based on these principles, it introduces a series of distributed data and metadata management algorithms that enable a high throughput under concurrency. Third, it shows how to efficiently impleme...