Typically, in distributed server environments, many different physical servers contain duplicate information, thereby permitting large numbers of clients to access the same information from different servers. Often, this is accomplished by directing each query to a different server in a round-robin fashion. This type of distributed server environment provides faster access to data, since much of the processing and network traffic is distributed to many different servers.
Generally, the distributed servers are updated by pushing information to each of the servers. In other words, if the contents of the servers need to be updated, then the new contents are often uploaded to each of the servers from a central repository. Unfortunately, when a vast number of servers need to be updated concurrently, the bandwidth is occupied during the time of update, thereby slowing network traffic. In view of this deficiency, a need exists in the industry for controlling and maintaining information in distributed server environments.