A system provides of data islands of a federated environment storing scalable data used to efficiently search for data and/or other objects across the federated environment and access details of any objects while minimizing the data replicated across all of the data islands. The scalable data may be replicated across all of the data islands and allow a local search for any object across the federated environment. The scalable data may be a subset of data and/or configured meta data that stores a limited subset of data that enables the local search, at each data island, for objects stored in the federated environment.