Nuking disks of an HP Storageworks VA

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi,

I was asked to decommission an SG Cluster with attched storage in an HP Virtual Array.

Before I have the irons picked up for scrapping I would like to safely wipe out/"shred" the storage.

For the Root disks I know some commands/procedures I could execute to achieve this.
However, I am not so sure what to do with the VA's disks.

I guess that a mere

# armfmt -f -h

would not quite suffice?

Could I simply write dd patterns on the array's LUNs after having reformatted it by the above command, much as I would do with the root disks?

Regards
Ralph

[Horia Chirculescu]

Hello, Ralph

Why not? Just do it before you trash your root disks. It is much easy to do it :-)

Best regards,
Horia.

[Ralph Grothe]

Hello Horia,

yes, I issued the command (after I had removed the cluster shared VGs),
whereupon all PVs/LUNs disappeared from ioscan.

I was only wary if that would be enough.
Well, the data of the array was anyway scattered across the disks and seems unlikely to be retrieved from the disjointed lot now to me.

Or could this maybe even be "improved" by setting up a new array for the sole purpose of wiping each disk by writing nulls or patterns on them?

[mvpel]

In the classified computing environments where I work, disks are physically destroyed (drilled, shredded, etc) when the system is declassified.

But when disks are moved from one classified program to another, we use the "BCWipe" utility - http://www.jetico.com/wiping-bcwipe/ - which complies with the DoD 5220.22-M standard. It's available for HP-UX 11 and a variety of other UNIX platforms.

You can download a 21-day eval copy, or just buy a full version for 40 Euro ($57.45 US).

[mvpel]

PS: DoD 5220.22-M is the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM), and the term it uses for a "disk wipe" procedure is "sanitization," though that term can apply to other types of hardware as well, such as EEPROM contents.

[Torsten.]

If you have a DS2405 enclosure as an expansion of the VA, you can connect it directly to the server and format the disks using command view.

This will format the disks from 520byte blocks back to 512 blocks.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Ralph,

I do not believe your commands will suffice.

In general, installing an operating system and writing data to the disks is sufficient to stop all but the NSA from recovering data from your disks.

dd patterns can work, but must be run many times to insure the data can not be recovered.

SEP

[VK2COT]

Hello,

If you are using recent version of HP-UX 11.31 that you can use a native tool for
disk "cleanup". HP-UX is the only commercial
Unix that has a DoD 5220.22-M compliant
disk scrubbing tool without paying anything
extra.

Check mediainit(1) on HP-UX 11.31.

Cheers,

VK2COT

[VK2COT]

... and to see if your version of mediainit(1) supports disk scrubbing simply run the
command:

# mediainit
usage: mediainit [-vrn] [-f fmt_optn] [-i interleave] [-p partition_size] pathname
usage: mediainit -S [-V] [-t scrub_count] [-c scrub_character] special_file

Of course, if you want commercial tools, there are plenty of them.

VK2COT

[Horia Chirculescu]

Hello,

>mediainit -S [-V] [-t scrub_count] [-c scrub_character

Just wanted to say that mediainit's disk scrubbing facility is not avaiallable in all HP-UX versions (no -c , -t option).

You can read also another topic:
http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=458247

Format and then random writing of dd patterns should do the job.

But, you can allway get some caterpillar to run over your media

Just rent a similar hardware:

http://www.cat.com/equipment/track-loaders/small-track-loaders?mode

Ultimate solution? Or not. Maybe some US gov. agency guy would get some glue and would repair the small pieces of hardware and would re-construct the lost data. Just imagine ...

Best regards,
Horia.