Intellyx BrainBlog for Verity ES by Jason Bloomberg
The days when data centers were rooms full of racked servers are gone. Today’s data centers are clouds.
The difference: operational processes and the software that supports them.
In the past, data center operators managed servers and racks one at a time. Today, the cloud virtualizes, automates, and abstracts the hardware – the proverbial ‘cattle, not pets’ approach to data center gear.
These cloud-centric operational processes optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) of data center physical assets by establishing formal lifecycles for each component, from purchase to installation to operation to end-of-life.
End-of-life for storage media, however, often presents a roadblock to seamless data center operational processes, because such media potentially contain confidential or sensitive information.
Eradicating data remaining on such media, therefore, is an important operational process for any data center.
Why Data Eradication is Such a Challenge
There are three main reasons why a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) might reach end of life: it might fail due to a hardware issue, it might be replaced due to a tech refresh, or it might be returned at the end of its lease (which may or may not be part of a broader tech refresh).
When either an HDD or SSD fails, operators cannot simply throw it into the trash. To prevent the loss of data that might remain on the media, the traditional approach to data eradication is physical destruction of the drives.
There are several problems with physical destruction, however. It requires expensive equipment: industrial shredders that chop the drive (housing and all) into unrecoverable bits.
Operators must then dispose of this debris, which might contain hazardous waste – another expensive step.
Perhaps most significantly, there are opportunity costs to physical destruction. If it’s possible to use software to adequately wipe a failed drive, then it’s possible to return it for warranty replacement or trade it in at the end of a lease.
Software-based data eradication in the case of drive failure, however, is at best hit-or-miss, since there are different reasons why a particular drive might have failed. In many cases, software-based eradication can still work, but its effectiveness depends upon the quality of the eradication software.
The other reasons for drives reaching end-of-life, tech refreshes and lease terminations, raise the stakes on data eradication. After all, such erasure is even more important when discarded drives are fully functional, as it’s much easier to recover data from them.
In either case, used drives typically enter the secondary market, where anybody can purchase them. Regardless of whether a particular drive reaches end-of-life because of hardware failure or some other reason, data eradication is essential for minimizing the TCO of that drive.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
