Since 2007, Penn State University has been researching ways of addressing the challenges associated with storage support for the tremendous growth of information and data within Penn State University Libraries and the university as a whole. Simple processes used in the past, such as copying data sets, finding a specific subset of data, or replacing storage arrays, are becoming extremely complex operations that are too large and time consuming to accomplish within acceptable levels of service. Software solutions built to manage large repositories of data also require application-specific knowledge, long-term migration, and integration challenges that often result in large and unwieldy silos of data.
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