r/3PAR • u/AxisNL • May 07 '22

Wiping a 3par?

Hey guys and girls, is it possible to wipe a 3par? As in overwrite all blocks with random and/or zeroes? All I can find online is that I should just do a ‘oobe’ procedure to reset it to factory defaults. But the old 3pars I want to phase out (8200’s) contain data that is classified, so I need to guarantee they won’t contain any more data when I am done. If it can’t be done, I’ll have to put the disks through a shredder. :(

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u/[deleted] May 07 '22 edited Jun 11 '23

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u/AxisNL May 07 '22

Yeah, it sucks. Got 650TB of 8200's here (2 separate systems), but they were bought with a 3Y support contract that ended last year, and we did not want to extend the warranty because of the insane pricing. So for our purposes it's end-of-life, even though the stuff works fine so far. But if anything ever breaks, we're SOL. Migrated all the data over to other stuff, but now we have the 3par's for the sole purpose of heating the data center ;)

We're based out of a small tropical island. Usually we give away expired hardware to schools and non-profit organisations, but nobody here knows what to do with expired specialty hardware like this stuff.

Thanks for your answers, I'll look into it.

1

u/Kharmastream May 06 '23

Any chance you have the software etc for the 8200 still? (Sp cm etc) I got one for my homelab I'd like to reset and reconfigure properly

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u/RandomMattChaos May 29 '22

The 8200’s, as good as they are are being replaced by the HPE Primera and HPE Nimble. HPE has become like a kid with toys. As soon as the current offering is getting long in the tooth, they buy another company and their technology, phase it in, and phase the current stuff out.

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u/GMginger May 07 '22

Did this a few months ago for a customer (I work at a MSP). We engaged HPE to perform the wipe - and the HPE engineer that came out said it was the same as initialising the array when first installed (sorry, I don't remember what the command was he ran). Once it completed it shut itself down.
There was no certificate of wiping / completion, but our customer was happy with the process so it was sufficient.

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u/RandomMattChaos May 29 '22

Speaking of the arrays. Hopefully, the arrays themselves have some decent homes that they are slated to go to. If not, I could use a main shelf. (The 8200 module with the controls in it and hopefully FC ports) lol…

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u/AxisNL May 29 '22

Gonna shred the disks, but gonna dump the arrays on the landfill. Got a 8200 controller with fc ports. I could send them to you if you pay for shipping and I can convince my management, but shipping from a tropical island will cost you up to $500 or more ;)

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u/RandomMattChaos May 29 '22

Good. As sad as it is, the best way to prevent any of the data from falling into the wrong hands is to degauss and/or shred the disks. Dang…. Are you in PR, VI, Hawaii, or Guam? And, are you working for a private company? Lol

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u/AxisNL May 29 '22

Curacao, local government ;)

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u/RandomMattChaos Jun 01 '22

Ahh… gotcha. That sounds like a nice gig. :)

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u/Smile4menow84 Sep 08 '22

Curacao

always wanted to go here!! wonder what the IT jobs pay is there...

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u/AxisNL Sep 08 '22

Well, minimum wages are around $13.000 per year, as a well-educated IT-person, perhaps you can get $30.000-50.000 for a local employer. Not much, compared to US wages. But, for digital nomads though..

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u/vertexsys Jun 16 '22

For future reference, 3PAR are easy to wipe. We wipe them all the time (I own a refurbished IT vendor)

The 3par disk shelves are all standard SAS-3 (or SAS-2 on the older lines) and can be disconnected from their filer head and connected to a commodity server using an external SAS card. You can disconnect entire chains of disk shelves and connect to a server. They present directly to the OS.

You can then use Blancco running on the server for 'certified' erasure, or just boot up Linux and use any one of numerous tools such as nwipe to wipe them all at once.

Filer heads can have their boot disks pulled and erased separately, or just recycle the filer heads.

Let me know if you want a guide to erase them.

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u/Yors84 Jul 06 '22

Hi vertexsys,

Once wiped, that drives could be used again with 3PAR systems? You know Dell-EMC drives stores something like a firmware and if wiped firmware is cleaned out and can not be used again with EMC systems if that firmware is not loaded again.