Processing i/o operations in parallel while maintaining read/write consistency using range and priority queues in a data protection system

A non-transitory storage medium having stored therein computer-executable instructions which, when executed by one or more hardware processors, perform the following operations:

• receiving a stream that identifies I/O operations requested to be performed with respect to a data grouping;
• identifying, in the stream, random I/O requests and sequential I/O requests;
• queuing the sequential I/O requests in a priority/processing queue and processing the sequential I/O requests immediately without waiting for loading of any metadata;
• and
• processing a first one of the random I/O requests and a second one of the random I/O request, wherein the processing comprises:
• defining a metadata load queue by assigning each of the random I/O requests to a respective range of metadata;
• loading the metadata of each range;
• and
• re-queuing the random I/O requests,
• wherein when the first and second random I/O requests each depend on the same range of metadata, the first and second random I/O requests are processed in the order received, and when the first and second random I/O requests each depend on different respective ranges of metadata, the first and second random I/O requests are processed at the same time.