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- Dec 22, 2003
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Right, I'd not normally post for help on this sort of subject here as I've normally got lots of other resources however this one is a bit of a stumper.
My companies biggest money maker is secure wiping of hard drives, in or out of their respective laptops/desktops/servers/racks/arrays etc.
We *have* to use a particular peice of software which limits us to doing 4 drives at a time in any circumstance. We can artificially increase this to 16 drives by making 4 RAID arrays - however this eliminates the assett tracking side of things as serial numbers of individual drives are no longer recorded.
We are starting to get more and more drives separately, outside of the units - normally in caddies - mainly Sun, HP, Dell and IBM and currently I have 3000 drives, mostly HP/Compaq to get through.
Currently, I have built up 4 racks with 10 HP Proliant 580's in each, meaning I can do 120 units at a time - but this obviously takes a lot of juice and a lot of space. It takes an average of 4 hours to wipe the batch of drives.
We can *not* change the software, being the most obvious answer. We are bound by regulations by the government and other organisations who's names I'm not allowed to divulge to use that software because of the standards of wiping it can do (hence the time taken).
However, I have had an idea that may help treble production time - using a virtual server system, running 8 virtual machines per physical unit and using a drive enclosure hooked up to each unit, with 4 drives allocated to a certain SCSI channel and then to a certain virtual machine. However, I've tried this with VMWare and MS Virtual Server to no avail - the software boots from LAN and freezes - this I suspect is down to the software layer (the virtual machine) between the hardware and the wiping software. I've thought about ESX and Xen Server on other's recommendations however as hard as I look, I've not got the hardware requirements to do that (mainly 64bit hardware - everything we have is P4 HT or MP Xeons, neither of which are 64bit/em64t). Apparently these packages are lower level than the likes of VMware (although I know ESX=VM) and Virtual Server, however not being able to directly test them I cant confirm this.
So, questions being:
1) does anyone have experience with ESX or Xen and probably more importantly;
2) would this idea be likely to work in the first place;
3) if neither of the above, any other cunning plans I can look at to save time, hardware, space and electricity bills?
My companies biggest money maker is secure wiping of hard drives, in or out of their respective laptops/desktops/servers/racks/arrays etc.
We *have* to use a particular peice of software which limits us to doing 4 drives at a time in any circumstance. We can artificially increase this to 16 drives by making 4 RAID arrays - however this eliminates the assett tracking side of things as serial numbers of individual drives are no longer recorded.
We are starting to get more and more drives separately, outside of the units - normally in caddies - mainly Sun, HP, Dell and IBM and currently I have 3000 drives, mostly HP/Compaq to get through.
Currently, I have built up 4 racks with 10 HP Proliant 580's in each, meaning I can do 120 units at a time - but this obviously takes a lot of juice and a lot of space. It takes an average of 4 hours to wipe the batch of drives.
We can *not* change the software, being the most obvious answer. We are bound by regulations by the government and other organisations who's names I'm not allowed to divulge to use that software because of the standards of wiping it can do (hence the time taken).
However, I have had an idea that may help treble production time - using a virtual server system, running 8 virtual machines per physical unit and using a drive enclosure hooked up to each unit, with 4 drives allocated to a certain SCSI channel and then to a certain virtual machine. However, I've tried this with VMWare and MS Virtual Server to no avail - the software boots from LAN and freezes - this I suspect is down to the software layer (the virtual machine) between the hardware and the wiping software. I've thought about ESX and Xen Server on other's recommendations however as hard as I look, I've not got the hardware requirements to do that (mainly 64bit hardware - everything we have is P4 HT or MP Xeons, neither of which are 64bit/em64t). Apparently these packages are lower level than the likes of VMware (although I know ESX=VM) and Virtual Server, however not being able to directly test them I cant confirm this.
So, questions being:
1) does anyone have experience with ESX or Xen and probably more importantly;
2) would this idea be likely to work in the first place;
3) if neither of the above, any other cunning plans I can look at to save time, hardware, space and electricity bills?