A Persistent Object Manager for HEP

% RD45 \\ \\ RD45 is currently investigating solutions to the problem of storing, managing and accessing the extremely large volumes of data that will be created at the LHC where, given the anticipated lifetime and data rates, a system capable of scaling to approximately 100~PB is required. The project places strong emphasis on the use of industry standard solutions wherever possible, and is currently focussing on the potential use of commercial standards-conforming Object Database Management Systems transparently coupled to Mass Storage Systems. Production use of components of what could eventually become the solution for LHC has already been made by existing experiments at CERN, and it is planned to gradually increase the amount of physics data handled by the system into the multi-TB range and beyond over the next years