Patent ID: 7873696

Claim:
A system comprising: a plurality of blades for servicing user accounts, wherein each blade includes software components and hardware components, and wherein each blade serves a group of user accounts and a user's connected dataset, and wherein the plurality of blades includes a first blade and a second blade, the user's connected dataset being implemented by an aggregated backend comprising at least one of the plurality of blades; a switch for directing a user device to the blade that is responsible for managing the user's connected dataset according to the network address of the blade or information included in each request for determining a target blade, wherein the switch comprises one or more hardware instances for routing network traffic to the blades; a blade manager for managing states of the plurality of blades, wherein the blade manager comprises a computer readable storage medium encoded with computer readable instructions, the instructions for: incrementally adding one or more new blades in response to an increase in the number of new user accounts; and a pipe device for connecting the first blade and the second blade, wherein the pipe device comprises a computer readable storage medium encoded with computer readable instructions, the instructions for: sharing a data set between a first user account served by the first blade and a second user account served by the second blade, comprising: sending a copy of the data set and a copy of a set of access restrictions corresponding to the data set from the first blade to the second blade for local access by the second user account; sending changes to at least one of the data set and the set of access restrictions made by the first user account received from the first blade to the second blade; and receiving changes to the copy of the data set made by the second user account from the second blade, checking the corresponding set of access restrictions, and sending the received changes to the first blade as the data set modified by the second user account if the corresponding set of access restrictions indicates that the second user account is authorized to modify the data set.