Recent regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) specify rigid rules for data retention and compliance, requiring data archived in a immutable, easily accessible form. Data volumes may extend into the several terabyte range, while data retention periods range from a few years to decades.
WORM disk storage solutions evolved to address these requirements. WORM (write once, read many) storage began as optical disk technology allowing only one permanent write of each storage location. WORM disk arrays are known as read-only hardware in Sybase IQ. Read-only hardware functionality is provided by low-cost disk array hardware with a WORM protection layer added. The protection layer allows normal read-write use of the disks until the data is “frozen”.
When data is frozen, the user specifies an indefinite or fixed retention period. The disks may be frozen at the volume or file level. Once frozen, data may not be modified, and the retention period may be extended, but never decreased.
Read-only hardware functionality is not limited to WORM disk array hardware; you may also remove write privilege from a raw device or file system file after the dbspace is altered read-only.
