Geral,

Optical (WORM) has been used for meeting SEC requirements for books and records for over a decade now. I think the question is really "Is anyone using an optical system for books and records any longer?"

Most large scale optical systems that were in place for meeting WORM requirements for financial regulations have been migrated off of optical and onto spinning disk with WORM based disk technologies such as EMC Centera. For books and records the access requirements even on optical is generally acceptable from gigabytes, to terabytes stored the speed and performance is generally acceptable given the standard use cases for audit requests from the SEC.

Most SEC audit queries are generally around key-field data with ranges of amounts or specific trade or cusip numbers for example, and these are generally fast queries and acceptable retrieval performance even if several levels of robotics have to take place.

Moving forward, I haven’t seen anyone deploy new optical storage within the financial services sector for SEC related regulations. Nearly everyone is deploying disk based worm from several of the leading storage vendors. With optical, and the two year reasonably accessible requirement, you also never know when your ability to respond to a request (quickly) will be compromised.

Good Luck,
Peter
March 2009

* http://www.csi1000.com
* http://www.emc.com/products/family/emc-centera-family.htm