Distributed DVR allows for any hard drive on the home's network to act as the storage device for your DVR, theoretically eliminating the need to even include an HDD in the set-top-box and giving customers the unadulterated ability to scale their storage capacity to fit their needs.
Microsoft's Distributed Systems group utilized a new file system architecture, dubbed Flat Datacenter Storage, over a full bisection bandwidth network to burn through the competition.
Most of the network access was more to have access to large storage space, which was typically broken up and distributed across employees as separate areas.