Making large amounts of data available to users in a distributed computing environment

There has always been a need for inexpensive storage of large amounts of data. With the accessibility of data from remote sites over the Internet and the proliferation of large tiles in the form of documents, images, software packages, databases, etc, this need has been compounded. In addition, personal computers and high speed modems have become commonplace in homes and other remote locations away from the office, making access to data files mandatory 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. To complicate matters, the data needs to be available to users dktributed over many different systems on a network.