Yesterday, my Sun Microsystems vendor pointed out something I didn't want to think about: as my data storage climbs into multi-terabytes, our current way of storing/distributing data is no longer feasible. Damn, multi-terabyte datasets are irksome...

Here's some idea of the problem.
1) Everyone needs to see all these data, across many different computation machines.
2) Each dataset may need to be "live" for years, as research can take years to fruit. Hence, multi-stage storage strategy may not be applicable.