CAVERN, the CAVE Research Network, is an alliance of industrial and research institutions equipped with CAVE-based virtual reality hardware and high-performance computing resources, interconnected by high-speed networks, to support collaboration in design, education, engineering, and scientific visualization. CAVERNsoft is the collaborative software backbone for CAVERN. CAVERNsoft uses distributed data stores to manage the wide range of data volumes (from a few bytes to several terabytes) that are typically needed for sustaining collaborative virtual environments. Multiple networking interfaces support customizable, latency, data consistency, and scalability that are needed to support a broad spectrum of networking requirements. These diverse database and networking requirements are characteristics typically unexhibited by previous desktop multimedia systems but are common in real-time immersive virtual reality applications.