Another poster I think put it better: what the patent is describing is essentially building a DNS system for data. Claim 1 describes how DNS forwarders work (the "client" is a DNS client, the "server" is a DNS forwarder, and the "data location server" is a DNS authoritative name server). Claim 10 then describes how a DNS recursive resolver works (the "client" is the rescursive resolver, and the "data location servers" are authoritative name servers). Claims 17 and 18 then essentially describe the full distributed DB that uses this DNS-like mechanism for retrieval.
The sub-claims are just covering minor variations of the implementation, and can safely be ignored in general in any patent.
The sub-claims are just covering minor variations of the implementation, and can safely be ignored in general in any patent.