Global data in Designer 7.x

I know that, the old global data functionality has been dropped in the Designer7.x, but the worst part is that I miss it :). I really need, somehow, to simulate what used to be the global data in a model process. Could somebody tell me how am I able to do that? It would be very useful to me to have instance variables, so I can set and read the values of those variables at any point of the process model instance.

Thank you.

We have same need, did you find any workaround ?