WORM, WORSe and WORN are three archive tiers defined by the Active Archive Alliance, as it sees AI requiring fast access to recently archived data which requires dynamic access.
These tiers are defined in a 14-page special report, entitled “Preparing For Tomorrow’s Expanding Storage Challenge With Active Archive,” which you can download here. The report notes “As organizations increasingly require fast access to vast amounts of historical data, the concept of an active archive has become a cornerstone of long-term and infinite data preservation strategies. Artificial Intelligence (AI), business intelligence, healthcare, and scientific research are examples of industries that mine archival data fo…
WORM, WORSe and WORN are three archive tiers defined by the Active Archive Alliance, as it sees AI requiring fast access to recently archived data which requires dynamic access.
These tiers are defined in a 14-page special report, entitled “Preparing For Tomorrow’s Expanding Storage Challenge With Active Archive,” which you can download here. The report notes “As organizations increasingly require fast access to vast amounts of historical data, the concept of an active archive has become a cornerstone of long-term and infinite data preservation strategies. Artificial Intelligence (AI), business intelligence, healthcare, and scientific research are examples of industries that mine archival data for insights previously overlooked. This shift is transforming data archives from passive repositories into active engines.”
An active archive has two or more storage media technologies; HDD, SSD, tape, optical disk – managed through intelligent data management software. The actual storage devices can be on-premises or in the public clouds, where they typically have an S3 or Azure Blob interface. The archive tiers will range from relatively hot (SSD, HDD), warm (HDD, optical disk), to cold (ytape).
The report presents a data lifecycle diagram;
Data typically flows from left to right through this lifecycle, as it ages and its access frequency falls, but it can be needed afresh and move back leftwards. The diagram says it becomes hot for a brief period of time.
Th AAA report sets out three archive access tiers; WORM (Write Once, Read Many), WORSe (Write Once, Read Seldom) and WORN (Write Once, Read Never.) These are associated with three archive types; Active, Archive and Deep.
A further diagram shows the likely data type distribution percentage across these tiers;
The rise of AI models, and the associated need for historical business data to be analyzed and processed by AI models and agents, puts a premium on fast access. But that means SSDs for the fastest access and even high-capacity and QLC SSDs are still more expensive per terabyte than disk drives, while needing less electrical power. This tension between access performance, power cost, and media cost is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.
It may be that even higher-capacity SSDs, at the 250 TB and 500 TB levels, in the 2026 – 2028 period could reduce the price differential between HDDs and SSDs sufficiently to prompt their use in active archives.
Lower down the performance scale, it is perhaps foreseeable that tape archives could find themselves pushed back into colder data storage as glass-table based optical storage, such as that being developed by Cerabyte, could provide a new storage layer between tape and disk. The feasibility of that will become clearer in the 2026/2027 timeframe.
Bootnote
The thirteen Active Archive Alliance members and sponsors are: Arcitecta, BDT Media Automation GmbH, Cerebyte, FujiFilm, IBM, Iron Mountain, MagStor, Point, Savartus, Spectra Logic, Wasabi, Western Digital, and XenData. Folio Photonics was a member but difficulties in bringing its optical storage to market coincided with its membership lapsing.
BDT makes tape libraries.
Savartus was founded in late 2024 as an independent spin-off from Rimage Corporation’s Active Archive division