‘It’s a lot like a woodchipper’
The shredder, supplied and operated by ShredPro Secure, a small business in East Tennessee, is a mobile unit about 4 feet wide and stands waist-high. The hard drives are fed by the technician into an opening at the top of the machine, where counter-rotating metal teeth tear the drives apart and reduce them to small, irregular strips a few inches in size. The mobile shredder can shred one hard drive every 10 seconds, with a theoretical capacity to process up to 3,500 hard drives a day.
“It’s a lot like a woodchipper. The teeth of the shredder tear the drives into tiny pieces, making it impossible to reconstruct into a functioning drive,” Abston said. “Even though we’re not dealing with classified data, the data still belongs to the users, and we have a responsibility to make sure it’s protected.”
After the drives are shredded, a conveyor belt gathers the material and deposits the waste into a bin, which is then transferred to larger containers and taken to be recycled through ORNL’s metal recycling program.
“Any metal that we recycle, the money comes directly back to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory budget. So, not only is this an environmentally friendly approach, it’s also more budget friendly,” Abston said.
Passing the savings on
Decommissioning major computing systems is an evolving process that Abston and his team have refined over the years.
The last time they decommissioned a system like Alpine was in 2019 with the Atlas storage system. With approximately 20,000 hard drives, Atlas was roughly two-thirds the size of Alpine. Regardless, Abston recalled, doing everything in-house took the team nine months to complete the job, and at a substantially higher cost.
Working with an outside vendor allowed the team to process drives from additional support systems beyond Alpine, increasing the workload by about 10,000 hard drives. As a result, they completed twice the amount of work in under two months, a task that previously took nine months — and at a significantly lower cost.
What’s more, the experience provided a business case for the lab to purchase its own shredder for use on future projects, which will allow ORNL to pass on even more savings and improve data security.
“Shredding on-site at our facility, in the long run, means we’re gonna come out with a much cheaper disposition that saves taxpayers money,” said Abston.
User data previously stored on Alpine was transferred to other OLCF storage systems. Summit will continue operating until Nov. 1, 2024. On November 19, Alpine2 will be switched to read-only for Summit and will then be reconfigured into a nearline storage system supporting other OLCF data capabilities.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.
This Oak Ridge National Laboratory news article "Retiring — and shredding — the Alpine storage system" was originally found on https://www.ornl.gov/news