Storage Foundation Cluster File System High Availability 7.2 Administrator's Guide - Solaris

About shredding data

When you decommission a disk that contained sensitive data, you may need to destroy any remaining data on the disk. Simply deleting the data may not adequately protect the confidential and secure data. In addition to deleting the data, you want to prevent the possibility that hackers can recover any information that is stored on the disks. Regulatory standards require that the confidential and secure data is sanitized or erased using a method such as overwriting the data with a digital pattern. Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) provides the disk shred operation, which overwrites all of the addressable blocks with a digital pattern in one, three, or seven passes.

VxVM provides the ability to shred the data on the disk to minimize the chance that the data is recoverable. When you specify the disk shred operation, VxVM shreds the entire disk, including any existing disk labels. After the shred operation, VxVM writes a new empty label on the disk to prevent the disk from going to the error state. The VxVM shred operation provides the following methods of overwriting a disk:

VxVM does not currently support shredding of thin-reclaimable LUNs. If you attempt to start the shred operation on a thin-reclaimable disk, VxVM displays a warning message and skips the disk.