Patent ID: 8521783

Claim:
A system for providing a highly reliable and scalable architecture for data centers, comprising: a pool of work units that combine to form a discrete task and are located on a central data store, wherein each of the work units in the pool is marked as eligible or ineligible for processing may be processed and completed independently from the other work units in the pool; servers that each comprise a processor and a computer-readable storage medium including computer executable instructions executing on the processor, wherein each server of the servers is configured to: load a handler for processing a work unit; determine available resources on the server; request any available work unit from the pool of work units that can be processed by the loaded handler when the server has available resources; in response to determining the work unit is to be processed, generating a ticket that uniquely identifies the work unit that is provided to the server for use in authenticating the server before allowing the server to update to the work unit; dispatch the obtained work unit to the loaded handler for processing; process the obtained work unit; and mark the dispatched work unit as completed when the obtained work unit has been completely processed and when the obtained work unit has not been completely processed marking the obtained work unit as eligible for processing within the pool of work units such that the eligible work unit is automatically re-dispatched from the pool of work units when requested.