The early bird catches the Worm
The early bird catches the Worm
How Sony is using write once, read many (WORM) technology in its tape systems to help its users fall into line with the latest regulatory demands and steal a march on its tape system rivals.
Despite the fact that Sony has been a major player in the business market for a number of years, it is fair to say that it is still widely recognised as a manufacturer of consumer electronics, so it seems appropriate to make an analogy between its latest offering in the data storage market and the media that was used with its most famous consumer product-the Walkman.
When you had a favourite compilation tape that you didn't want to record over, you simply broke off the little tab on the cassette (remember those?) which rendered it unable to re-record upon.
Now Sony has taken that concept and brought it across to its tape storage solutions, although the tape media's capacity to record is automatically removed once it has been recorded upon the first time, without the need to fiddle around breaking a tab off with the end of your ballpoint pen or a nail file!
The company's next generation of tape drives, called SAIT (Super Advanced Intelligent Tape), will come complete with WORM data protection functionality.
Computer Associates has been working in partnership with Sony on its WORM offerings, combining Sony's WORM-enabled family of desktop and slim-line AIT StorStationTM autoloaders and libraries with its WORM-ready BrightStor ARCServe Backup software, and Sony's AIT WORM tape media.
"What CA has done is written some software code in their BrightStor product that is relative to AIT WORM. This is specifically for markets, such as the healthcare industry, where it is very important that your data cannot be erased. The media is the key, as WORM media locks itself and says you've written on me once, you can't write on me again," explains Peter Norman, marketing manager, business solutions division, Sony Australia.
Norman adds: "Compliance legislation says that if you are called to discovery and you bring your tapes back, you can't say the tapes were accidentally erased. You have got to show due diligence and one of the pieces of legislation concerning due diligence is that you have a storage media that is write-once."
Sony claims the introduction of WORM functionality within its SAIT offerings gives it a distinct advantage over rival tape storage vendors, as no other 500GB tape drive is available on the market at present with WORM functionality.
Another advantage that Sony has in terms of manufacturing is in relation to its background in consumer products, with a number of components used in mass-manufactured consumer products also compatible with its business hardware, creating significant economies of scale.
"It's a huge advantage because we make so many of them," says Norman. "We got the DTF transport from our SX and Betacam camcorders. It was the same transport and the same motors-just a different head structure. Because we came from a video recording background, if you can double the manufacture of the drives, then the cost of manufacturing becomes really good."
Norman is quick to rubbish claims that tape will be replaced by disk storage, which is currently used for mission critical and near-line storage. Tape remains the favoured media for archival storage and will continue to be so, says Norman, despite what some disk-based vendors would have us believe.
"You hear some companies pushing Serial-ATA that say you don't need tape as they can fulfil your needs cost-effectively with Serial-ATA.
"For lot of applications, like insurance and banking, with lots of small files which you absolutely have to have instant access to, Serial-ATA may be the solution, but there is a greater percentage of applications where there are huge files (that are not mission critical), and the cost benefits amount to about a 60 percent saving for putting them in a tape driver. Tape silos will not go away-not for another 50 years."
Related Article: