Essentially all distributed systems, applications, and services at
some level boil down to the problem of managing distributed shared
state. Unfortunately, while the problem of managing distributed shared
state is shared by many applications, there is no common means of
managing the data -- every application devises its own solution. We have
developed Khazana, a distributed service exporting the abstraction of a
distributed persistent globally shared store that applications can use
to store their shared state.  Khazana is responsible for performing many
of the common operations needed by distributed applications, including
replication, consistency management, fault recovery, access control, and
location management.  Using Khazana as a form of middleware, distributed
applications can be quickly developed from corresponding uniprocessor
applications through the insertion of Khazana data access and
synchronization operations.