interface for tar

["Mag Gam" <magawake@gmail.com>]

At my university we run fluid dynamic simulations. These simulations
create many small files (30,000) per hour. Their size is very small
(20k to 200k). Instead of having this on the filesystem since it take
up inode space, I would like to tar them per day into one tar file. I
would then like an interface similar to zsh/ksh to "cd tar.file" and
use it as a typeical shell. Do tools like that exist? That would be
very benefical for us and our system admin does not have to yell at
us.
Any thoughts or ideas?

TIA