IBM System Storage DS8000

[matexoza]

i got hold of one of these filled with 300g sas ssds with some fiber optic cables slots on the back what would i need in a blade server to use this?

[leadeater]

All you would need is Fibre Channel HBAs, and Fibre Channel switches if you need a lot of servers to connect. Blade Chassis usually have unified/shared I/O for the blades but because of this you need the specific FC HBA that would fit in the blade chassis you have.

 

This is an extremely short overview of how to use this type of storage array, I would suggest going on a training course for it.

[matexoza]

i work for a e-waste recycling company we just got in 8 of these from a data center in the area my interest in them is to be used as a platform for me to run parted magic / nwipe im currently using this method on a server with 8 drive bays and it works pretty well my goal is to up that setup to around 100 drives 

 

the problems with nwipe/dban come in where you get drives that fail the software doesn't tell you which drives fail so running large arrays is an issue 

whit the server setup the drive lights show as a nice indicator of which drives are which and allow us to run more at a time thus my need for this many drive bays 

 

all that being said

the best possible option for me would be to use one drive rack per 1 server in a rack the hbas where something i found already my next question would be

 given the fiber cable connect directly to a server via the hba would the server find that as a normal drive array 

 

(im not very good with server tech so if any of that came out as jibberish sorry ;p) 

 

[leadeater]

On the DS8000 you'll have to create storage LUNs and export them to the HBA WWN then the server will be able to see it.

[leadeater]

It does however sound like the DS8000 isn't really what your after though, it manages the disks etc so running dban on them isn't really the same as doing it on a standard desktop or server.

 

Are you wanting to use this for mass wiping of disks?

 

You could use FC HBA or SAS HBA in the servers you have and connect the disk shelves directly to the server, not using the DS8000 controllers, so you can see each disk individually. I think this is what you were meaning, didn't properly read your reply the first time.

[matexoza]

yes that is what i was meaning after spending the last 4 hours reading up on everything you posted in the last post i kind of figured out that wouldn't work for

me 

 

ill read up on the setup for fc hba and sas hba (takes me a bit to catch up with you lol)

 

ty for all the help just reading about all this has been so much fun i got the job at this place just so i could play with all of their stuff and they have not disappointed at all lol i have a flat of laptops stacked to my waist to mess with today (I'm 6'3) will keep you posted on how it's working out =)

[matexoza]

Well after testing all of the drives that came in them today we found all to be bad or at least 2 bad for us to deal with all registered when tested but nun would work so decided not to spend the money testing this out but we did get 3 more 8 drive dell blade servers so I think I'm just going to hook up the 4 of them we have in a rack with an 8 port switch and wipe them that way and that will give us room to make it larger as we get in more blade servers that still putts us at 32 drives running at a time that's a very long way from the 4 they were doing when I started here 

[brwainer]

9 hours ago, matexoza said:

Well after testing all of the drives that came in them today we found all to be bad or at least 2 bad for us to deal with all registered when tested but nun would work so decided not to spend the money testing this out but we did get 3 more 8 drive dell blade servers so I think I'm just going to hook up the 4 of them we have in a rack with an 8 port switch and wipe them that way and that will give us room to make it larger as we get in more blade servers that still putts us at 32 drives running at a time that's a very long way from the 4 they were doing when I started here 

So let me get this straight.... you work for an e cycling company that takes old hardware from anyone who pays you, and if there is any hard drives you have to properly scrub them, and you are using hardware you reclaimed from your customers in order to wipe their drives? That's genius and hilarious!

[leadeater]

8 minutes ago, brwainer said:

So let me get this straight.... you work for an e cycling company that takes old hardware from anyone who pays you, and if there is any hard drives you have to properly scrub them, and you are using hardware you reclaimed from your customers in order to wipe their drives? That's genius and hilarious!

Yep I'd do the same thing, why spend money on equipment when people are already paying you to take theirs which in most cases is perfectly fine 

[Mark77]

What's wrong with just finding some old SAS controller on eBay or similar for a few bucks, and setting up a system to wipe the SAS SSDz using the tools you know how to use (ie: DBAN)?

 

Doing all this stuff to be able to access them through what sounds like some sort of SAN box sounds like a mess unless you know what you're doing, and might not even insure that you're fully wiping them.  If there's client data on them, surely you owe it to them, if not are contractually obligated to use a verifiable wiping method before you tender the parts for resale or disposal.

[matexoza]

people don't all ways pay them to take the stuff most of the time they just take it break it down and sell the metals as scrap 

my job there is to try to fix/resell as much as im able to also sometimes they buy the stuff in large numbers from people 

 

they also have these machines that like grind down wires from everything and collects the copper from the wires comes out like a big ass box of tiny pieces of copper its pretty cool mostly i fix/upgrade test laptops and desktops (they have boxes of ram from ddr2-ddr3  

 

say you get a core 2 duo laptop that has 1-2 gigs of ram ill upgrade that to 4-8 gigs depending on the type of cpu  anything i3 or better gets 8 gigs anything core 2 duo or around that grade gets 4 gigs (got in a ton of laptops i was going to fix but they took all the ram cpus and heatsinks out of them)

 

as for the sas controllers this was my original plan the problem with doing it this way isn't so much that they can't wipe them when there set up this way the problem is when you run dban on hdd's they tend to fail very often(also got to think its a scrap warehouse more or less so alot of them are bad anyway)

and dban while it runs very well on a single drive its pretty tuff to use when you need to wipe 1000 drives basically it has no kind of out putt that shows  which drive failed when hooked up to more then one drive so the problem at first was just to move them from a 1 drive at a time setup to a multidrive setup 

the only way i could come up with to manage this was to move from a standard desktop to wipe to a server system to wipe them 

 

what makes the servers more suitable for this is the fact that the controllers/drive trays have indicator lights on them  that will show when the drives fail allowing us to locate the bad drives  (at the start of this post we only had 1 server running this way with a 4 bay capacity)

 

now the idea of using this sas storage system wasn't so much that we wanted to use them

(didn't know what they was at first  figured them out a good bit with the help of the awesome guy in this post)

 

but that we needed more drive bays to wipe and you are in fact correct the idea of using these for what we needed was not the best way for us to go about it 

 

however the servers are still very much imo still the way to go 

that being said when we switched to a server setup we also needed better control over the presses and dban just didn't allow this for us 

so we also had to find a better way to manage this and the best way i could come up with for this was to switch to a parted magic(linux distro for pc diagnostics) running a version of nwipe (a dban derivative with added hardware support might be other stuff added 2 not shore) which also allowed me to run dban from a single terminal with as many copies as i wanted to run at a time in a very nicely laid out ui  

 

so that is the way we are going to go with the setup we picked out this nice 8 port switch a few 2u dell PowerEdge servers with 8 drive bays

so the new setup will have 3 of them servers starting out hooked to a switch in the office with the kvm linked to a screen keyboard and mouse on the desk 

with future upgradeability from  24 drives upwards of 100 should we so chose to go bigger 

while still allowing us to make sure 100% that it is in fact wiping the drives 

(we also have this machine that breaks drives in half should the data need to 100% without a doubt be destroyed the drives that this is requested for are no wiped or reused)

 

all this started from me not liking the 4 dell desktops they had setup when i first started there

 

hope that wasnt to long for you guys got carried away lol but this has been a 3 week prosses for me lol