topic Re: p4300 secure wipe in StoreVirtual Storage

p4300 secure wipe

phillbl1 — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 03:13:39 GMT

hi,

we are working on a project and part of includes creating a bcp plan. we have a second site running on 2 x 4300 unites. part of the the contract is that we need to secure wipe the system after the restore is proved to be complete.

if i format the luns and then destroy the network raid level 1/5 will this leave any data recoverable on the storage once all the luns etc are destroyed. i know i could purchase some software but was wobdering if what i mention above would be enough.

thanks

Re: p4300 secure wipe

oikjn — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:54:52 GMT

I guess it depends on how sensitive your data is and how much someone would pay to recover it. Unless you do a multi-pass wipe, the data COULD be recovered, but honestly its more an academic exercise unless you are talking about data that would be worth millions of dollars to the attacker to recover. You are talking about hardware raid and network raid and recovering erased data from a drive... that would be rather costly and time consuming.

IMO, just to cover your ass, I would delete the LUNs, then create a couple large LUNS that were fully provisioned NR10+however many you can add (1/2/3/whatever), and then mount them on a couple computers and do a full format to each lun (I say a couple computers and a couple luns so you can split the load of formatting across multiple computers or it might take a long time to do depending on your size).

Since you say "contract", I would use that as your judge. Depending on the stakes, I would probably lean towards buying software to do a "secure wipe" because you locked yourself in with that verbage and if the other party is ultra-paranoid about it and the contract has teeth to ensure compliance, you would save a lot of grief by just getting that extra software to run even though a simple delete-LUN+new-LUN+complete format should be enough 99% of the time.

Re: p4300 secure wipe

AmanaLiving — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:57:28 GMT

Depends how you're presenting the ISCSI targets to the server. If you are using hardware ISCSI you could use DBAN live CD and let it run over the weekend.

http://www.dban.org/

Re: p4300 secure wipe

oikjn — Thu, 02 May 2013 03:33:33 GMT

you should be able to do the same by presenting the LUN to a VM. Or mounting it on a running windows server and using something like condusiv's "undelete" which ironically has a secure detele function (and a free trial if this is a short-term need), or therea are a ton of other programs that are cheap to buy and give the same function such as www.securedriveerase.com .

dban.org should work too and you can just pass the VM the iscsi disks too. short answer is there are a thousand ways to do this for little cost (not including the extra time it takes to run). I would suggest you do a DOD wipe if your contract tells you to do a secure wipe.