Sharding

Sharding is one of several popular methods being explored by developers to increase transactional throughput. Simply stated, sharding is a way of partitioning to spread out the computational and storage workload across a peer-to-peer (P2P) network so that each node isn't responsible for processing the entire network's transactional load. Instead, each node only maintains information related to its partition, or shard. (re blockchain)

According to block explorer Etherscan, Ethereum full nodes already take up at least five terabytes of space, which is about 10 times what the average computer can hold.

also...

method of improving Data Base Scalability by partitioning data onto multiple servers

(horizontal partitioning for Scalability)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_%28database%29, http://del.icio.us/tag/sharding
• Jan'2009: Eric Ries on an approach he thinks is Start Up-friendly. (url-based)
• http://www.hibernate.org/414.html
• http://www.opensourceguy.net/2007/05/01/sharding/
• http://highscalability.com/unorthodox-approach-database-design-coming-shard
• Theo Schlossnagle http://www.lethargy.org/~jesus/archives/95-Partitioning-vs.-Federation-vs.-Sharding.html