Storage, access and analysis of such large data sets will be an ongoing challenge due to continuing increases in users demands as well as continuing changes in technology. Cost versus performance tradeoff studies will continue to be of interest as a larger fraction of the stored information is placed on-line. Application specific approaches are driving both research and development. Beyond the usual performance issues, the preservation of data in spite of eventual component failures is another key issue. As the size of the data sets increases, data loss can become an unavoidable reality.
Data replication provides the traditional remedy.
Less expensive data storage organizations are required. The informaton dispersal algorithm is one such approach. These data reliability approaches have negative run-time performance consequences giving rise to additional tradeoff studies. Currently one specific storage application is MPEG encoded multimedia data.