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VPLEX Data Erasure?
Hi,
We have a major government department asking for 'data sanitation' of two VPLEX devices which are to be decommissioned from their environment and physically returned to EMC. There appears to be no pre-packaged erasure services for VPLEX.
Does it make sense to erase data on a VPLEX? Is the data in any form such that customer-sensitive information can be obtained or discerned? If so, how would we go about organising a data erasure service deliverable?
Thanks,
Steve Read
SQC Quoting Lead,
Sydney, Australia
MikeCram
15 Posts
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August 18th, 2016 07:00
The only possible customer data that could be retained on VPLEX would be on a VPLEX Geo with asynchronous consistency groups. Normal operation for Geo is to mirror a write to the peer director cache and acknowledge the application. During a power outage, the cache is vaulted to the director flash drive in order to protect it. After power has been restored the vaulted data is returned to cache and continues the normal processing of the deltas. If the system in question were configured as a Geo then the flash modules on each of the directors would need to be scrubbed.
For both a Local and a Metro configuration there would be no vaulting of cache data as they are both cache write through mode and there is no requirement for protecting data in cache. If there were a power outage the data is already on the array and any data that was in cache at the time would simply disappear as the cache is volatile memory.
Ayrton_Senna1
62 Posts
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August 8th, 2016 10:00
To my knowledge, vplex does not store anything except the cached data on each director. You can flush the cache using Vplex cli cache-invalidate command. You need to unmount those volumes from host before you perform this step. Apart from that i don't see any place to perform data erasure for Vplex. You can perform cache-invalidate for all volumes in a Vplex if you place them in a consistency group.
Anonymous
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August 8th, 2016 16:00
Thanks Ayrton - this really helps. I'll work with the local team to close out.
Cheers,
Steve
Ayrton_Senna1
62 Posts
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August 8th, 2016 16:00
Please mark question as answered if you find this helpful.