Patent ID: 8392546

Claim:
A distributed managed system, including: a plurality of targets, including a first target; a plurality of clients, each client adapted to originate one or more commands, at least some commands having a desired destination of one or more targets, including the first target; and a management processor adapted to receive commands originated by the plurality of clients and generate a context value for each received command having a desired destination of one or more targets, the context value indicating a particular client that originated a corresponding command; wherein the management processor adds the context value to each corresponding command to create corresponding commands with context and dispatches each command with context to the desired destination; wherein at least one target, including the first target, is adapted to receive commands with context from the management processor, interpret the context value in each received command with context to identify the particular client that originated the corresponding command with context, determine a priority and sequence for processing the received commands with context using multi-user/multi-tasking policies, the determined priority and sequence based at least in part on the context value associated with the corresponding commands with context, and process the received commands with context according to the determined priority and sequence, and targets include intelligence that processes and implements the received commands with context using multi-user/multi-tasking policies so management and command line processing of the commands are distributed to the targets instead of the management processor.