When your business is moving at light-speed, your storage environment just has to keep up.
User growth, competitive pressures and customer expectations combine to stress IT infrastructure at every level. That’s the story with a leading cloud-based CRM vendor that is setting growth records year-after-year. To meet intense quality-of-service demands while maintaining optimal price-performance, the company has adopted a tiered-storage environment that ranges from ultra-high-speed solid state disk (SSD) to ultra-high capacity hard disk drives (HDD).
While this business never stands still, neither does its technology environment. Technology refresh is a frequent, and necessary, way of life. Out with the old; in with the new. Not without certain security precautions, of course, such as data sanitization of the departing gear.
That gear must be cleansed of all data before leaving the secure confines of the company’s data centers. Anything less would compromise their rigorous privacy standards, not to mention expose them to regulatory and legal risk.
Can the data sanitization process keep up with this high velocity technology turnover and still maintain the highest security standards? The answer is yes, of course, and it is why, once again, this IT organization brought in Revert, Inc. to do the job.
Revert has 20 years of experience in enterprise data centers, having eradicated more than one million storage devices, primarily from the large storage systems of virtually every enterprise storage vendor. Their reputation for quality is second to none. In this particular case, though, quality and speed went hand in hand.
Covid-19 Throws a Curve Ball
In an unprecedented time brought on by the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, data centers have struggled to maintain any semblance of normalcy. Many projects have been thrown off course, leading to significant backlogs. As restrictions eased, IT vendors faced enormous pressure to catch up.
The data sanitization process had to keep up with the new reality. The client called on Revert to deliver on a massive and complex data eradication process with only a few days notice. Last generation hardware had to be off the floor in one week. The arduous and time consuming (7-passes) eradication process had to go off without a hitch.
The hardware in question: Two NetApp AFF8020A Flash Array systems with a total of 72 400GB and 3.84TB solid state drives; a NetApp FAS8060HA system with 384 900GB and 1.2TB hard drives; and a NetApp E5700 system with 60 9TB hard drives.
To accomplish this task in the crunch time allotted, Revert scoped and deployed a mix of multiple proprietary hardware/software platforms and experienced human resources. The eradication processes were performed via “direct-attach,” meaning the eradication platforms were connected directly to individual disk shelves and/or daisy chains.
Seven passes on the 9TB hard drives proved to be the gating factor, requiring virtually all of the allotted week’s time.
At the very end, albeit in accelerated mode, Revert provided its customary, comprehensive eradication reports, with details down to the model and serial number, enabling NetApp to move the retired gear off the floor in real time.
To paraphrase an ancient quote: “Difficult times call for difficult measures.” Isn’t that the ultimate measure of an outstanding service provider? This leading software company would answer with a resounding yes.
