The necessity of manipulating very large amounts of data and the wide availability of computational resources on the Cloud is boosting the popularity of distributed computing in industry. The applicability of model-driven engineering in such scenarios is hampered today by the lack of an efficient model-persistence framework for distributed computing. In this paper we present NeoEMF/HBase, a persistence backend for the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) built on top of the Apache HBase data store. Model distribution is hidden from client applications , that are transparently provided with the model elements they navigate. Access to remote model elements is decentralized, avoiding the bottleneck of a single access point. The persistence model is based on key-value stores that allow for efficient on-demand model persistence.