Essentially all distributed systems, applications, and services at some level boil down to the problem of managing distributed shared state. Unfortunately, while the problem of managing distributed shared state is shared by many applications, there is no common means of managing the data-every application devises its own solution. We have developed Khazana, a distributed service exporting the abstraction of a distributed persistent globally shared store that applications can use to store their shared state. Khazana is responsible for performing many of the common operations needed by distributed applications, including replication, consistency management, fault recovery, access control and location management. Using Khazana as a form of middleware, distributed applications can be quickly developed from corresponding uniprocessor applications through the insertion of Khazana data access and synchronization operations.