Oh, that sort of thing would be a tape-NAS sort of appliance and costs big $$$$. I know IBM talked about it before. I think here's their PDF of some university

Oh, that sort of thing would be a tape-NAS sort of appliance and costs big $$$$. I know IBM talked about it before. I think here's their PDF of some university that did this: https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/b076c94c/files/uploaded/FLAPE_IBM_EDGE_Presentation_FINAL.pdf https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/b076c94c/files/uploaded/... --------------- The distributed data-thing is pretty common in the supercomputer world. I know that the nodes on the "Summit" supercomputer each have a local SSD for caching, and a centralized hard-drive array for longer-term storage. I'm pretty sure the software just manually copies the data around as necessary (that is: any software written for the supercomputer can copy data from the central storage into a local SSD). Supercomputers can have that kind of simplicity, because you buy 3000+ nodes with the same specs. So you know all nodes will have that 1.6TB SSD available. No matter which node your software ends up running on, the SSD location is set and obvious. It doesn't matter how the data is archived: you read it in and wait (it could be tape, hard drives, or any other mechanism)