Storage Technology Corp says it’s the first tape company to offer an alternative to write-once read many WORM optical disks, which until recently were the only electronic option for companies required by law to store records for long periods of time. Storagetek says its new VolSafe feature, now in beta testing, turns its own Redwood tape drives into WORM drives that pass the requirements of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which amended its rules in February 1997 to enable brokers and dealers to store records of trades and accounts for seven years. At that time optical WORM drives were the only storage medium to meet the SEC’s security requirements. Louisville, Colorado-based StorageTek says the tape option is up to ten times cheaper, costing around one cent per megabyte compared with 11 cents per megabyte with optical. Other industries needing to file electronic data, such as medical institutions, will also be targeted. VolSafe adds both physical and logical security to Redwood drives. VolSafe cartridges include a yellow notch identifying them to both system operators and the drives themselves as write-only cartridges. And the logical security is provided by microcode on the tape drive and bit settings on the media that disables the erase head and alters the write function so that it can only write onto blank tape. Existing Redwood drives must be upgraded to include the microcode, but this can be done free of charge. VolSafe will be fully available in the third quarter, when pricing will be set.
