The evolving field of distributed storage

The ongoing evolution of storage and network technologies has supported the rapid growth in the field of distributed storage over the past few years, but a widely-felt demand for more and better storage is a significant driving force behind this growth. The demand arises from an apparent de-facto economic and cultural mandate to store and archive as many bits as possible. This trend poses interesting new challenges as storage systems are asked to store not just bits, but also the their semantics; for what use is an image that can't be seen because its format has been forgotten or a program that can no longer be executed because the machine that ran it no longer exists?.