Veritas Access Appliance 8.2 Solutions Guide for Enterprise Vault

Write-Once-Read-Many support

When a file is committed as Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM), the data in the file can be read but cannot be altered. The retention time for a WORM file specifies the time period for which the file must be retained after it is committed to WORM storage. The file cannot be deleted till the retention period expires. Once the retention time period has expired, the storage system allows the deletion of the file.

The retention period cannot be reduced once it is set.

In the Access Appliance 8.2 release, the maximum value for the retention time period is 6 February 2106.

The WORM property is set at the file level. The file can be committed or enabled as WORM on a file system created with 'WORM' support. A new option has been added in the Storage> fs create command to enable WORM support.

You can find out whether a given file system is WORM-enabled or not using the Storage> fs worm get <fsname> command.

See the Storage> fs list man page for more details.

A new option has been added in the Access Appliance GUI as a policy to enable WORM support. You can find out whether a specific file system is WORM-enabled or not using the File Systems tab in the Access Appliance GUI.

While creating a partition in the Enterprise Vault Administration Console, select Device stores data in WORM mode.

Figure: Creating a new partition

Enterprise Vault archiving processes check the target servers for items to archive at scheduled times. When an item is archived, it is automatically assigned a retention category, which defines how long it must be kept in the archives (retention time). The administrator can define different retention categories for different types of data. Enterprise Vault monitors the archives and deletes items when the retention period expires.

Enterprise Vault sets a retention time on individual files. It sets the retention time by setting the access time of the file to a date in the future. For WORM-committed files, the access time of the file indicates the retention time.

Enterprise Vault uses a CIFS share, which exports the WORM-supported file system to archive data in WORM mode. Create the CIFS share with the full_acl option.

Any file system and CIFS share created in this way can be used as WORM storage for Enterprise Vault's archival on WORM-enabled storage.