War of the WORMS
War of the WORMS
November 01, 2004: The idea behind WORM media is to help solve some of the many fears that organisations currently have about new compliance regulations; to provide the capacity needed to store large quantities of electronic records for many years, but more pertinently, to offer a medium where information can be made easily accessible for internal and external audits.
These regulations demand that information should remain stored and untampered for a set amount of time. WORM tape cartridges have been created so that large amounts of information can be kept securely, without being erased or changed.
These compliance regulations include the Sarbanes Oxley Act, Clerp 9 and FSRA. The US-derived Sarbanes Oxley Act requires companies to certify the accuracy of financial statements and disclosures and indicate in each periodic report whether or not there were significant changes in internal controls or related factors since their most recent evaluation. Companies are also obligated to disclose all deficiencies in the design or operation of internal controls. So this requires information to be kept 100 percent secure and unchanged.
Australia's Clerp 9 (Corporate Law Economic Reform Program) aims to improve corporate transparency and corporate disclosure, as well as increase accountability of companies to shareholders, enhance audit independence and protect employees who blow the whistle on breaches of legislation. This demands that critical information is kept stored securely at all times.
The FSRA (Financial Services Reform Act) was introduced to bring all financial services and products under one regulatory regime. It also aimed to increase the level of compliance and competency in the financial services industry. Two components of FSRA are licensing and training. Every person who gives advice about a financial product (e.g., superannuation, insurance, derivatives or shares, etc) must either hold an Australian Financial Services License (the licensee) or be authorised by a licensee to give advice on their behalf (referred to as an authorised representative).
People within organisations are likely to face imprisonment or expensive fines if they breach any rules forced upon them by these kind of recent regulations, so the WORM tape has a big responsibility to live up to.
The vendors who are in the market to face off these challenges have all tackled these difficulties in similar ways, but there are subtle differences that might make some organisations think twice about which one offers the best value.
IBM's 300GB WORM tape is supported on the TotalStorage Enterprise Tape Drive 3592. It has the ability to read a variety of IBM tape cartridges, including the IBM WORM cartridge.
The tape drive is designed to automatically detect the WORM cartridge and prevent accidental or malicious changes to existing data. A new 60GB short cartridge for the 3592 is also available for applications, which require fast retrieval of more frequently, used data sets. WORM is now also supported in LTO libraries, and the market is eagerly awaiting the release LTO3 to see how significant the functionality will be in the war of the WORM media.
Garry Barker, IBM's storage specialist, explains why he believes IBM offers the best WORM cartridge facilities in the market: "The beauty is that our drives can read many different forms of IBM tapes, whereas other vendors need alternative drives to read different tapes. Also, the drives are very fast at reading /writing data. They can do this at 40 megabytes per second if uncompressed, and even faster if compressed.
"The amount of memory on a WORM tape is very important to customers too. We intend to release a full terabyte on one tape in the near future. Costs of operations are lowered the more data you have on a tape because you use fewer automation resources in the tape library. This includes slots to hold the cartridges, robotic mount activities, catalog lookups."
"The key also is to have a good content management system in control of the technology, so you know when to dispose of the tape, archive and keep relevant data. Our management system takes care of these alerts too."
Rival vendor Quantum claims to have an advantage over the competition, including IBM, because of the WORM functionality of its DLTice, which provides it with the ability to degauss the tape cartridge.
Mike Sparkes, the product marketing manager for Quantum, says that the WORM tape cartridge can be re-used once the data-retention time limit has expired. Through the use of a special degaussing technique, all the magnetic data on the tape cartridge is scrambled without affecting the servo tracks on the tape.
"This means that administrators can re-use the tapes to store new data and continue the practice of rotating tapes once the data is considered no longer useful. Quantum's DLTice for Super DLT 600 also provides security to ensure compliance. It has a special identifier that cannot be changed or tampered with so that the archived tape version meets compliance needs. But once it is no longer needed for compliance reasons, instead of throwing the tape out, the user can purely degauss it and use it again."
The tape and the drive work with Quantum's DLTsage suite, which provides predictive and preventative management tools that allow administrators to monitor the use and health of drives and media for continuous backup and recovery.
Sparkes explains its benefits: "Whilst the cartridge is kept in storage as a WORM device, the IT manager can audit the tape during a specific period, for example, every 30 days. A pop-window will alert the IT manager if the tape is tampered with. If it has not been tampered with, a window will let the manager know that the tape is exactly how it was when it was first stored.
"This is essential in the world of compliance, where companies could face huge punishments if they fail to report information about tampered data. This tape creates greater transparency for companies to ensure that they can safeguard themselves against the risk of falling short of compliance requirements."
Sony's next generation of tape drives, called SAIT (Super Advanced Intelligent Tape), also has 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. The AIT4 WORM cartridge is planned for launch in December, 2004, with a capacity as big as 200GB (as native).
"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.
StorageTek has also announced the release of VolSafe WORM tape this year. VolSafe ensures data security by preventing users from writing over or erasing any previously written data and allows users to write additional data only on to virgin media area at the end of the last data file. Any attempts to erase data or write over data will receive a reject demand.
Graham Penn, associate vice president storage Asia/Pacific at IDC, has his own take on who is going to win the war of the WORM tapes. "We will have to wait and see what kind of response Sony will receive in the market. They have the technology to create a compliant-ready WORM tape, but they do not have the traction in the market and enough share to make a significant impact to start with."
"Quantum has a key advantage because it already has a large share of the market. Their tapes can also be re-used, and they have software that can audit the tapes, so this will be very attractive to organisations. We will have to see how the LTO series 3 is received when it is released next year. This is a WORM formatted drive created by the combined forces of IBM, Seagate and HP. But it is hard to say who will be the winner."
Penn says that Quantum's recent acquisition of Certance, a global supplier of tape drives and data protection solutions, for US$60 million, is basically a short term move to boost its total revenue from the low-end DDS/DAT platform and will possibly help some migration to DLT.
"It makes Quantum less dependent on DLT/SDLT for revenue and growth as it will now have available the low-end DDS/DAT segment as well as the LTO line. I expect the DLT/SDLT platform will still loose its grip in the single drive market overtime."
"LTO has been very strong in the tape automation segment, and that's where the big dollars are. I would expect Quantum's tape library business to be more evenhanded with the LTO platform in the automation side of business."
"But of course, the major compliance regulations are coming from America, and the race to be compliant is not as urgent here as it is over there right now. This means that we will be able to watch how the technology works over in the US first and learn from their successes and failures before we risk too much."
Phil Sargeant, research director for servers and storage at Gartner Asia Pacific, believes that Quantum also offers the best storage option. "I think Quantum is probably the most appealing for the high-end sector of the market and Sony is the best for the low-end. People will stick to what they are used to and Quantum already has a strong foothold in the enterprise space, which is also why it will be difficult for Sony to be appealing to enterprises.
"But the war could change depending on who offers the most storage for the lowest price."
As the need to be compliance gets more pressing, the battle to win customers in the WORM arena looks set to intensify. From the observations of the analysts, it appears that Quantum could win itself the lion's share of the market for a number of reasons, not least because of the ability to re-use its tapes, therefore offering a lower-cost solution. But then the introduction of Sony into this market, with its reputation as a very reliable manufacturer, and its high capacity offering, could also eat away at the space previously occupied by StorageTek, Quantum, IBM, HP and Seagate. The jury is out, but at least there is enough choice and competition out there to keep the vendors on their toes in the struggle to satisfy the compliance needs of organisations big and small.
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