Tim, I guess you have listed all the reasons why one would use WORM disk when replacing tape with disk.
Ron > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:ibm-m...@bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of > Timothy Sipples > Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:46 PM > To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu > Subject: Re: [IBM-MAIN] Disk replacing Tape? > > George Henke's post reminded me of one additional reason why many > organizations use tapes: it is very easy to physically isolate them from > any running programs on a routine basis. > > It's rare (getting more common?), but it is possible for software to go > "rogue," inadvertantly or intentionally. Let's just consider a human, > directly. Any storage that is attached to the computer he has "root" access > to he could wipe or, better yet, corrupt, if he wanted to. (Maybe he had a > bad day? Or year?) These days wiping all the encryption keys would do > nicely, rendering encrypted disk useless -- which is why there's the > concept of a "key vault." > > A set of tapes in a vault is beyond his reach. A physically disconnected > disk unit would be beyond his reach too, but to periodically separate your > data from all computing devices (and from the few rogue operators), tape is > very hard to beat. > > Maybe somebody has a solution in mind for how you get that near-foolproof > vaulting without tape. I'm curious about that. I suppose one way would be > to put hard drives in caddies of some kind, load them up, then vault the > spindles-with-caddies. But doesn't tape do that well? > > One analogy is the seed vault that's somewhere in Scandinavia. It's a vault > containing samples of the world's most valuable seed crops. The vault is > biologically separated from the entire rest of the world, so if there's > some new virus or other disease which rapidly wipes out crops, the seed > vault stands in reserve. It stores the world's seeds, on tape, so to speak. > > - - - - - > Timothy Sipples > Resident Architect (Based in Singapore) > STG Value Creation and Complex Deals Team > IBM Growth Markets > E-Mail: timothy.sipp...@us.ibm.com > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO > Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
