The Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System (CLASS) is the centerpiece of NOAA's distributed long-term preservation archive that gives focus to the building and sustaining of key observational assets and data critical to maintaining the global climate record. In April, 2011 responsibility for program and project management of CLASS transitioned from NESDIS Office of Systems Development (OSD) to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). The purpose of this transition was to recognize that CLASS has for years been an operational system ingesting, storing and providing access to a host of near real-time remote sensing streams such as the Polar and Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (POES and GOES) and the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP). In addition to these older datasets, CLASS now serves as the long-term archive for the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Climate Forecast System Version 2 (CFSv2). This archive provides users global reanalyses of the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice fields and land over the past three decades in addition to complete reforecast of the CFS over the same period. CLASS is also the dedicated Archive Data Segment (ADS) of the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project (NPP). As the ADS, CLASS will receive raw and processed NPP records for archival and distribution to the broad user community. Moving beyond just remote sensing and model data, NOAA has endorsed a plan to migrate all archive holdings into CLASS while retiring various disparate legacy data storage systems residing at all the Data Centers. This coordination of safe-storage, access and stewardship assets by the NOAA Data Centers will cost-effectively maximize stewardship of the Nation's ocean, geophysical and climate data.