Sony and Partners Add WORM Support to SAIT Backup Devices

   At this week's AIIM conference, Sony Electronics and its partners, which include Qualstar and XenData, are expected to announce the addition of write once, read many (WORM) support to Super Advanced Intelligent Tape (SAIT-1) backup drives. Starting this month, all SAIT drives that Sony ships will have WORM functionality as a standard feature. The move is intended to give businesses another option for long-term data retention. The storage industry is increasingly concentrating on providing solutions to address government and regulatory data compliance, which are important parts of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 17a-4 of the Securities Exchange Act. "Tape continues to be a desirable format for archival storage, and write-once solutions allow companies to economically meet their storage needs as well as to comply with mandates for record storing," said Fara Yale, research vice president at Gartner.
   The feature is being added to Sony's SAIT-1 backup drives, which offer native 500GB capacity (approximately 1.3TB compressed capacity) per cartridge. The WORM support will require special SAIT WORM-compatible media. Sony expects the new media to be priced slightly higher than typical SAIT-1 media. Sony will make the new drives available to OEM partners for resale this month. Sony-branded standalone drives will be available this spring.