There is now one more tape vendor to the write-once, read-many (WORM) party.
Joining fellow tape drive makers Sony, StorageTek and IBM in the WORM business is Quantum Corp., which has released a firmware patch that transforms its existing SDLT 600 drives into WORM drives.
Sony and StorageTek were one of the first vendors in this segment, when they released WORM-based AIT and (IBM's) Magstar-clone solutions respectively a few years ago.
Last week, the maker of DLT and SDLT tape drives and media announced a firmware upgrade, called DLTIce, for its top-of-line SDLT drive, which gives it WORM capabilities.
All new Quantum SDLT 600 drives will ship with the new firmware, while existing ones can be upgraded by downloading the free firmware patch. Older drives, however, like the SDLT 320 will not be upgraded.
The moniker "ice", as Jim Simon, director of marketing for Quantum's Asia-Pacific pointed out, denotes the unchanging nature -- frozenness -- of data on a WORM media.
Citing escalating corporate compliance requirements and the tardiness of CD-based technology, Simon told media in Quantum's Singapore office he is confident the company's new WORM drives will be a hit. Recent estimates by AMR Research pegged the amount that corporations will spend to comply to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act at US$5 billion this year. A fifth of that will be expended on technology.
He said that Quantum now has one of the cheapest WORM-for-tape solution in its class. He compared it to IBM's WORM for tape solutions like the TotalStorage Enterprise Tape Drive 3592, a higher-bracket tape solution IBM lists at US$32,000. SDLT 600 drives have a street price of about US$5,000.
Worming quickly
With WORM, information that is stored cannot be altered, making them legal- and audit-friendly. Although Simon acknowledged that the famous Sarbanes-Oxley Act does not expressly stipulate the use of WORM drives, he said that using the WORM medium for backing up crucial organization data will facilitate any auditing process in general. And at least one important financial regulation, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 17a-4, requires that records must be preserved on a "non-rewritable, non-erasable" format.
Existing WORM solutions are actually fairly ubiquitous. There are abundant cheap solutions in the form of CD-R and DVD-R drives, as well as those that use magneto optical (MO) technology. But optical disk-based technologies have slow transfer rates, ranging from about 1 MB/s (for a 48-X CD-ROM drive) to about 3MB/s (for a 16-X DVD-ROM drive).
Superdrive solutions like the SDLT 600, on the other hand, can move data at a sustained rate of 36MB/s.
Like CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, the SDLT WORM media can be appended as often as needed. Which means more information can be added to the same media over different sessions. What about re-use? Simon pointed out that Quantum's SDLTape media can be totally erased and re-cycled as a regular or fresh WORM tape if needed, thereby "saving money" for enterprises.
Next question: How can users of Quantum's SDLT drives tell which tapes have been "iced", since there is no distinction between regular and WORM tapes? The answer is to use differently spine labels, although he said Quantum did consider the possibility of making multi-colored tape cartridge casing.
In the end, it took the more mundane route.
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