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THE CASE FOR CONTENT ADDRESSABLE STORAGE

The jury is out on the relevance of CAS in the Age of Archiving

CAS or Content Addressable Storage is a very popular industry buzzword that has been going around for a while now. Along with its half-sibling WORM (Write Once Read Many) it is designed for the most stringent of requirements – permanently preserving electronic information in its unaltered original form until such time as it can be destroyed. There are currently quite a few CAS solutions on the market, but it is not a saturated one and with good reason; there's a dirty little secret about CAS storage that does not get much press. Ready for the big secret? It is often a completely unnecessary expense driven more from fear or confusion than any sort of actual requirement.

In order to get to the root of this secret it is helpful to understand what CAS is and isn't. What CAS is in actuality is software that sits in front of the disk subsystem and governs the placement, retention, and access to the stored data. It is packed into the array itself in an appliance form so there are not extra servers to buy to utilize it, but it is software and as such is not infallible. CAS can be defeated pretty easily in fact, by someone with knowledge and access. What CAS is not is a magic bullet of compliance. I mentioned in the article on archiving solutions that no one piece of technology magically makes you compliant; you need process, procedure, and governance that drives compliance and the technology is just a tool.

So Why CAS?
There are two reasons to utilize CAS of any type, one is good and the other is bad. The good reason is that many legislative rulings, court procedure guidance, and compliance guidelines share one common element in that they all want data retrieved to be in its original format and unaltered. That is the big sell for CAS – once the data is written there it cannot be changed. This is only a little white lie since as an admin I could theoretically dump the archive to alternate storage, change whatever I want, and then put it all back, but the sheer magnitude of such an act pretty much negates its possibility.

The bad reason for CAS is a misguided trust in technology. CAS is an appliance or software or both and as such it can and eventually will fail. Companies have tech support teams for a reason and it is not because stuff never breaks. The trap that organizations fall into most commonly in this scenario is that they are afraid of some impending doom (certainly propagated by the person selling the solutions) and see the CAS solution as the only mitigation to this threat. The fact is that CAS works and works very well, but it is VERY expensive and with the advent of more complete archiving solutions the need for CAS hardware is lessening.

What now?
OK so everyone needs to archive data in its original format and unaltered state. That is just a fact. It does not matter if you are public, private, or a one man show, you can be sued in court and discovery requirements mean you have to produce the goods when asked for them. When the CAS device market really started up in 2002 there just were not many (if any) reliable ways to capture emails and documents prior to an end user having an opportunity to modify them. CAS was the bridge to where we are today since you could put all your files on the CAS and changes to the file were written as a new file meaning the original was always preserved. Emails had to be journaled or captured in some other way and then stored to the CAS device to get the benefit of its locked-down storage.

With today's myriad of archiving software getting the data to a CAS device is less of the challenge it was in 2002. This has effectively negated the CAS device's value to a certain extent in terms of being the only alternative for storing large archives of data. As LTO WORM media has increased in reliability and capacity this media has become a much lower cost alternative for those organizations with neither the desire nor the funding to implement CAS solutions. It performs the same functions at significantly lower cost when married with the right software solution to gather the data for archive.

CAS or not to CAS – that is the question.
Well that all depends now doesn't it? The first issue is money and in the current economic climate this is not a small issue. The second issue really boils down to a good risk assessment and likelihood of risk evaluation. In other words if you are highly unlikely to ever have to produce anything for a lawsuit then is the cost of CAS worth it or would WORM or even soft-locked storage be good enough? Lastly you need to be educated on the legislative and litigation precedents that drive your business requirements. Understanding what is required of your organization in terms of protection and discovery of data cannot be overstated – you have to know before you put any solution in place.

With the continuing growth of the archiving solution space and the continuing legislative and legal changes that always come about in times of turmoil it is certain that there will be even more changes on the horizon for compliance and protection standards. CAS is a powerful tool that can help your organization to meet these challenges, but it is not the only one, and even more so it may be overkill depending on what your requirements really are. As with any tool it is only as good as the person using it so make sure you read the manual completely and understand the right and wrong ways to apply it to your own set of needs.

About the Author: Chris Harrold is a Consulting Engineer at Sanity Solutions. Sanity Solutions is a nationwide specialist in data management, backup and recovery, business continuity, security, and infrastructure and support. Chris can be reached at charrold@sanitysolutions.com..

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