Several research projects promise improved distributed storage technologies as a way to cope with rapidly growing data volumes and increasingly scattered organizations. The OceanStore Project at the University of California, Berkeley, stores data on servers throughout a network. Other computers will be able to join the network dynamically. OceanStore will function as platform-neutral software that can be integrated with other applications, he explained. It will differ from private, closed storage area networks, because data will be globally accessible. University of Tennessee researchers have developed the Internet backplane protocol which functions as middleware for managing and using remote storage. Basically, the IBP lets storage nodes communicate easily via the Internet, thereby letting users access external storage resources.