Erasing Over 800 Servers Overnight for a Multinational Technology Company Case Study

In the data center, time equals money. And any solution you can invest in that saves you time is a win for your overall organization. Decommissioning servers, hard drives and solid-state drives is a pain point for many enterprise data centers. Typically, if these IT assets are wiped or erased before they are physically destroyed onsite or shipped offsite, the process is extremely time-consuming, with each asset having to be sanitized individually.

Challenge

A major multinational technology company was struggling with its decommissioning solution. While it used physical destruction to sanitize some of the hardware that left its data center, the company needed a software erasure solution to address erasure for servers that would remain in its network. While the data erasure solution the technology company was using met some of the its needs, and it was not a mobile solution. In addition, though the software was advertised as being highly efficient, it had a high failure rate, and the physical setup was complicated.

Solution

The company used Blancco Data Center Eraser solution to decommission servers in twenty of its global data centers. Efficiency, reliability, easy monitoring, control, convenient setup and mobility were important to the company. Blancco came in and tested its solution with the company in one of its California data centers in May 2017, performing miles above the competition. Overnight, the Blancco Data Center solution erased close to 900 servers, including a total of 5,117 6x1TB SATA HDD drives. The total time from setup to finish (report collection) was under ten hours. All erasures were done simultaneously and remote-controlled over the network through one Blancco Management Console. With this console, the data center could enter custom field information to meet the company’s security requirements and launch the erasure to all network connected servers at once. There was no need to connect a keyboard and monitor to each server.

Preparing the erasure job took under three hours from start to finish and was completed using the Blancco Enterprise Appliance, a self-contained system that allows for easy setup and execution within the secure facility. There was no need to go and touch each server; everything is remotely-controlled. Can you imagine how long it would take to erase 900 servers one at a time? The latest improvements in Blancco Data Center Eraser software allows a simultaneous erasure of 1000+ servers or 6000+TB of data (based on average 6x1TB drive per server) using a similar solution. Once the process is started, the same erasure solution can be taken elsewhere to start another erasure, achieving even greater erasure capacity.

Results

Huge time and manpower savings vs. the “traditional” (one-by-one) erasure process. Close to 900 servers securely erased overnight. All erasures came with a Certificate of Erasure for auditing and compliance purposes

About Blancco

As the de facto standard in data erasure, Blancco provides thousands of organizations with an absolute line of defense against costly security breaches, as well as verification of regulatory compliance through a 100% tamper-proof audit trail. Our data erasure solutions have been tested, certified, approved and recommended by 18 governing bodies around the world. No other security firm can boast this level of compliance with the most rigorous requirements set by government agencies, legal authorities and independent testing laboratories.