I think that you've discovered that Storable provides a persistence mechanism that enables you to dump and load data structures. You are also looking for something scaleable - you were worried about the time to store the data; having the whole data structure in memory is going to eat into your process and operating system resources if it gets large.

I can suggest two related approaches: objects and tieing. An object can be a placeholder for some point in your arbitrarily large data. If your application keeps to the OO encapsulation rules, you are only holding the data in memory that you actually need for manipulation; the other parts can still be accessed via method calls. One approach is to hold the data in a database, and use Class::DBI as an object persistence layer to turn rows into objects.

Tieing provides an alternative interface your data, and can make it look like an array or a hash (or a filehandle, etc.) When the application performs operations on the tied variable, method calls happen to do the sleight of hand and get your data. The application does not need to know that this is happening - it just sees an array (or hash). See perldoc perltie for more on this.

Hope this helps