Patent ID: 7206827

Claim:
A system, comprising: a plurality of servers; a data store comprising a persistent store of configuration information for the plurality of servers, wherein the persistent store is formatted in accordance with a data storage format; wherein one of the plurality of servers comprises: an in-memory representation of the configuration information formatted in accordance with an in-memory data format; a plurality of components configured to access the in-memory representation of the configuration information transparent of the data storage format to perform server configuration tasks; and a configuration Application Programming Interface (API) configured to store the in-memory representation of the configuration information to the persistent store in accordance with the data storage format of the persistent store; wherein one of the plurality of servers is configured to generate an instance of the in-memory representation of the configuration information and an instance of each of the plurality of components on one or more others of the plurality of servers, wherein each instance of the plurality of components is configured to access the corresponding instance of the in-memory representation of the configuration information to perform configuration tasks of its respective server.