Any people here well versed in EMC? I have an old CX400 series that I’m needing to scrub and donate and/or scrap. If I can get help scrubbing it successfully I’m then going to donate it to whatever non-profit wants it. If I can’t scrap it, then to the ranch it goes as a shooting target.
I haven’t gotten an EMC unit running before, but this was pulled working.
I have 5x loaded 15 LFF bay units, the controller, and the cache UPS.
Cheers,
-Jim
I used this on an old CX110 (I think; long gone now). I don’t know how similar they might possibly be…
thanks, but the bigger issue is getthing the thing running to begin with. This was originally acquired as part of a long term expansion in our small business to mitigate storage availability concerns, but that project was scrapped. I have never gotten an EMC hooked up properly before and initial attempts were not successful.
I actually might have to bring it by the makerspace just to try and turn the thing on via a 220v circuit.
The maximum possible system size is 8.7TB 13.4TB and the performance is worse than a typical SSD. I’m seeing multiple values for the maximum possible size. They probably made it larger as new drives came out, but by modern standards it’s on par with a single drive give or take. Given the weight, power consumption, legacy software, and general lack of support at this point I would just recycle it (or shoot it). It’s no longer a viable storage system no matter how you look at it.
I’ve got quite a bit of experience with storage arrays of this type and I agree with Luke’s assessment completely.
This array is at least 13-14 years old, and you can’t get any sort of manufacturer support for it at all any more.
If the DMS @Team_VCC wanted to get it up and running, I might be willing to help out. I’m pretty sure I still have some PDFs sitting around somewhere that could coach us through the proper cabling (assuming you have all of the necessary cables). But you’d also need Fibre Channel adapters, at least one Fibre Channel switch (the CX-400 didn’t support direct-connect), and it’ll need to be an older FC switch that still supports 1 Gb connections because that’s all that the CX-400 can handle. At the end of the day, no one should really be putting their data on this thing. It is bound to fail at any given moment and you aren’t going to be able to get parts to fix it unless you get lucky on eBay - and then you’re once again going to be buying parts that are 13-14 years old.
Please, please do not try to gift this to any organization and encourage them to put their data on it. It’s old, it’s slow, it’s unreliable, and it’s nearly impossible to fix it.
I still want to do a scrub regardless for completeness sake
There’s over 20TB of hard drives in this thing, and it’s got years worth of data that needs to be scrubbed regardless of where it ends up going.
I have the cables, I have the HA controller system, the cache UPS, everything. This was actually setup for greater than 1Gb operation IIRC with each controller supporting 4x SFP sockets that can be configured in various LAGG modes.
~H
Firstly, if you only have 5 disks, you probably don’t have any data, as the first 5 disks contained the FLARE and nothing else.
but maybe you have more than 5x hdd. It’s not clear to me.
So…
What’s “not running” about it?
To my recollection (very, very fuzzy at this point) you set a management IP on the SPE and connect to it to do your thing. I recall things being much easier with the NAVISPHERE software suite on the workstation you were using to manage it (which likely doesn’t even install on anything newer than XP, to my recollection) but I’m betting an inventive person could work around that, with it being (largely) java over http.
At any rate, here’s a site (out of date certificate warning) with quite a bit of info. Some of it may be helpful…
https://storagenerve.com/deepdive/emc/clariion/
Also, something I’m sure you’ve considered, and I don’t know what your salary rate is, but consider a professional, certified, drive shredding service instead of wasting your time on this. Secure Hard Drive Destruction Services | Shred-it
Of course, if you time is your own, the experience could be invaluable…
Five enclosures I think is what the system has. So 75 disks in total. I agree that a secure drive disposal vendor is the way to go unless it’s just for fun to try to get it running.
Ahh. Thank you. That makes all the sense in the world. I might’ve gotten there…eventually…
Our pyrotechnics group could help get rid of it. Ah, nothing like a magnesium fire in the morning, smells like victory!
Pics posted here, or it didn’t happen…
The CX-400 came with either 4 or 8 1 Gb connections. I know the CX-200 only had 4, and I know the CX-600 had 8, but the CX-400, as the middle child… I can’t remember for sure. Regardless, my point was that it will only log into a switch at 1 Gb. Modern FC SFPs (8 Gb or 16 Gb) will simply not run at 1 Gb speeds. You’d need an FC switch at least 8 or so years old or older to make this array work. The only link aggregation for these arrays is what you set up in the multipathing software on the host side, and honestly, due to the active/passive nature of this generation of Clariion, there’s only one good way to set that up.
Okay, whether or not what you want is actually possible depends on what you mean by a “scrub.”
If you mean a good, solid, certified data erasure where you do multiple passes of writes to the disks (00000,11111,01010,10101, etc.), then you’re flat out of luck. These arrays weren’t capable of that internally. EMC Engineering had a separate appliance that had to be shipped around the world and hooked up to arrays like this and left to run for X amount of hours (where X was usually in the range of dozens of hours). The Engineering guys only ever put together a bare minimum numbers of these appliances, so sometimes you had to wait weeks in the queue to get it shipped so that you could do a full array erasure. Needless to say, if these appliances still exist at all, they’re probably in a closet somewhere in North Carolina and even when they existed, the services offering to use them was like $50k or thereabouts. You’re not getting one.
If you mean that you just want to log into the array and wipe out all of the LUNs and RAID groups, then, sure, you could do that. Or… I have a much easier idea for you. Pull every other drive, drop it from about 5 feet onto pavement, and then put it in a dumpster. Wait a week, repeat the process for the other half of the drives. Honestly, this is probably overkill and what you could do instead is just shuffle all of the drives around within the drawers right now, set all of the enclosure IDs to 0 (that generation of Clariion DAE had switches on the back where you manually set the enclosure IDs), and scrap the whole thing. The amount of effort required to recover ANY meaningful data from the array at that point is truly colossal. Sure, if it contained massively important state secrets, then it might be worth it for someone to figure out, but even if it contained 100,000 stale credit card numbers and personal data, it just wouldn’t be worth it. Sure, technically, teeny tiny chunks of data would be identifiable here and there on the drives, IF you could actually attach to the individual drives, which isn’t trivial. However, that’s just as true whether or not you delete the LUNs and RAID groups on the array, since that doesn’t actually scrub the data from the drives at all.
The “third” option is just a pile variations on the second option, but you replace the 5-foot-drop with other forms of physical torture: strong magnets, extreme heat (a nice bonfire, but, y’know, that’s a lot of burning ABS and solder, bring a breather), or, as some others have suggested, an actual drive shredder. Those services cost real money (a super-quick Google search shows that you’d be looking at around $5 per drive x75 drives + tax, you’re looking at $400), and I really, really think it’s overkill unless you’re storing something that you don’t want the North Koreans to get their hands on.
Seriously, you could shuffle the drives in the drawers right now and take it to an electronics recycling place and know with a VERY high certainty that no one is ever ever going to get at that data. If you want to be one step more paranoid, take half the drives to a different place or separated by time, or whatever. And the next step more paranoid is various levels of physical destruction.
But getting the array up and running for a “scrub,” depending on what you mean by that, either can’t be done any more or is kinda pointless.
Sorry, man. It’s junk. Junk it.
In this case, I’m hoping to learn a bit more about them as part of the process. I encounter them every so often in my red teaming work and generally avoid them since they’ve been a black box for me.
It wasn’t originally mine, it belonged to another business I traded a lot of hardware with; part of the deal was that if I don’t end up using it then to scrub it.
I do have quite the stash of thermite lying around, but I would like to see this thing running just once to prod at the software a bit.
However, I’m not going to spend a ton of time on it; currently it’s all sitting on a furniture dolly in my apartment and getting the thing around is such a pain. It would be a good learning experience but I think I’d probably want to spend another 5/6 hours max on it before I just decide to take it out to the farm.
Cheers,
~H
Ah, so this is the news that I was hoping I wouldn’t hear. I was originally told these things had an onboard function for scrubbing that would pass audit.
Shredding or thermite it is then.
That functionality wasn’t included until at least 2 generations later, and I’m tempted to say 3 generations later in the CX-4 series arrays.
This array is really quite old.
Depends on your audit.
Back when I did mine, our “auditors” knew even less than I did, and I knew the “zeroed out” as shown in my link wasn’t ideal, but it was better than they were expecting. A decade or so in, they now have shred requirements instead of any wiping (and, honestly, we aren’t exactly storing secrets)…
Gotcha. Well, good luck on that journey, if you choose to accept it. They’re an interesting beast with a Windows NT heart…
What about using something like Nuke and Boot
Also I’ve started taking apart some hard drives for the disk platers. I’d like to make some art out of them.
So if you’d like some help erasing the drives and then I could take them apart.
-Kevin
Anyone know if you can weld hard drive platters?
platters are generally aluminum with a surface coating that carries the magnetic domains. So TIG yes, technically at least.
I hear the coating is Nickle so would MIG be OK?