...

But to start with, just solving the data storage problem is a good place to start.

How about something like: http://www.hdfgroup.org/whatishdf5.html

That certainly has a lot of support in the scientific community in similar applications such as astronomy and high-energy physics. However, if people don't understand the quirks of dealing with large amounts of time-series data they will probably look at HDF and consider it to be a poor out-of-date cousin of the relational database. In fact, it is simply a different approach to data storage which solves different problems than relational databases do. A good network management application would still use relational databases for some data and only use HDF for the big time-series (SNMP poll data). But HDF is still a general purpose format and it might be possible to do better with a specialized time-series database that has concepts such as deltas, missing values, or even wavelets. --Michael Dillon