Good Morning (or afternoon/evening, depending on your location) -
I'd like to conduct a quick poll on the process those of you employ to destroy failed filer hard drives. Do you use an outside service to physically destroy it, utilize something akin to 'shred -z,' or an entirely different approach?
Thanks, -t
Ted> Good Morning (or afternoon/evening, depending on your location) - Ted> I'd like to conduct a quick poll on the process those of you Ted> employ to destroy failed filer hard drives. Do you use an outside Ted> service to physically destroy it, utilize something akin to Ted> 'shred -z,' or an entirely different approach?
Well, since the failed disks are shipped back to NetApp under our maint contract, we don't do anything to them. And since they're dead... all we could do is physically destroy them if we were worried about data being stolen. Not a big worry since all you'd get is snippets in random chunks, esp for bigger files.
John John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com - 508-486-1087
Thanks for the reply, John. With this solution, aren't you concerned that something relevant could appear in one of those 8k chunks that WAFL writes? Several credit card or social security numbers might be strung in there.
-t
-----Original Message----- From: John Stoffel [mailto:john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com] Sent: Friday, February 18, 2005 10:36 AM To: Ted Weston Cc: 'Toasters' Subject: Re: Destroying failed disks
Ted> Good Morning (or afternoon/evening, depending on your location) - Ted> I'd like to conduct a quick poll on the process those of you Ted> employ to destroy failed filer hard drives. Do you use an outside Ted> service to physically destroy it, utilize something akin to Ted> 'shred -z,' or an entirely different approach?
Well, since the failed disks are shipped back to NetApp under our maint contract, we don't do anything to them. And since they're dead... all we could do is physically destroy them if we were worried about data being stolen. Not a big worry since all you'd get is snippets in random chunks, esp for bigger files.
John John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com - 508-486-1087
Ted> Thanks for the reply, John.
You're welcome.
Ted> With this solution, aren't you concerned that something relevant Ted> could appear in one of those 8k chunks that WAFL writes? Several Ted> credit card or social security numbers might be strung in there.
Not really since it's mostly engineering design data on our disks, and because we're not paranoid (or rich enough) to be able to afford to just trash the disks.
It's a calculated trade-off. We assume that NetApp does the right thing and crunches the disks once they have done a failure analysis back in their labs.
But I'm also new at this company and not up on all their historical reasons for doing certain things.
As a counter question, what do you do when you upgrade disk shelves and disks? Do others just trash all 14 72gb disks in a DS14 shelve when you upgrade to 144gb disks? Ouch...
John
John Stoffel wrote:
As a counter question, what do you do when you upgrade disk shelves and disks? Do others just trash all 14 72gb disks in a DS14 shelve when you upgrade to 144gb disks? Ouch...
John: I tried to get an upgrade deal on 36gb to 72GB drives and it was a no-go. We were going to have to discard the drives, so I had to just let the shelves sit in a corner. Problem is that it's not just NetApp, there's a VAR in the mix too, so it has to be attractive to all parties concerned. JKB
"John Stoffel" john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com writes:
It's a calculated trade-off. We assume that NetApp does the right thing and crunches the disks once they have done a failure analysis back in their labs.
Or sanitizes them before re-using them if they decide they are not actually broken after all.
I am (fairly) confident that NetApp do have sensible procedures for this sort of thing. I couldn't find a specific policy statement by them on this subject in a quick trawl round their web sites, though.
There's also the possibility of theft (or accidental loss) in transit, of course.
As a counter question, what do you do when you upgrade disk shelves and disks? Do others just trash all 14 72gb disks in a DS14 shelve when you upgrade to 144gb disks? Ouch...
When passing old disks on for use in other systems locally, or trading them in to NetApp, I zero them first. ("disk sanitize" is more recent than the last time, and anyway we aren't actually licensed for it yet.) If a disk that was out of maintenance failed before it could be zeroed ... hmmm, I suppose I would have to investigate the crusher / giant magnet / blast furnace techniques!
Hi Ted,
NetApp actually has a support option for not returning disks when they have failed. In that case, they ship you a new disk, and you destroy the old one. It costs a LOT more than the standard support, but is the easiest way to make sure that your data doesn't make its way elsewhere.
Thanks, Matt
-- Matthew Zito GridApp Systems Email: mzito@gridapp.com Cell: 917-574-1858 Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359 http://www.gridapp.com
On Feb 18, 2005, at 10:31 AM, Ted Weston wrote:
Good Morning (or afternoon/evening, depending on your location) -
I'd like to conduct a quick poll on the process those of you employ to destroy failed filer hard drives. Do you use an outside service to physically destroy it, utilize something akin to 'shred -z,' or an entirely different approach?
Thanks, -t <winmail.dat>
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Chris Thompson -
James Brigman -
John Stoffel -
Matthew Zito -
Ted Weston