Patent ID: 7885276

Claim:
A method of managing data in a server system, comprising: providing a plurality of physical servers, each having an internal gateway/switch that is accessible from outside the server; providing a plurality of virtual servers on at least some of the servers, wherein each of the virtual servers is accessible by the internal gateway/switch of the corresponding server; accessing data using the internal gateway/switch, wherein the internal gateway/switch determines which particular one of the virtual servers contain the data and then accesses the particular virtual server to provide the data; and associating portions of the data to tenants of the server system, wherein each of the servers maintains a first table that correlates tenants with the virtual servers maintained thereby and wherein the internal gateway/switch uses the first table to determine which particular one of the virtual servers contains data for a particular tenant and wherein entries of the first table include a tenant id, at least one virtual server id, and at least one corresponding internal address of at least one virtual server identified by the at least one virtual server id.