Decommissioning a full data hall
Rack level teardown, palletized removal in tracked vehicles, and media sanitization of every server, reconciled in one serialized report.
By Author Name
Title, Coretek 360
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Data centersPublished 6 min read
A full data hall was coming offline: racks of servers, storage arrays, and networking gear that had to be removed on a schedule and accounted for down to the last drive.
The teardown ran rack by rack. Equipment was palletized for removal, and every server's media was sanitized before the hall's contents were reconciled in one serialized report.
How the engagement ran
Nothing was touched before its serial number was logged. From there the work followed the same path every Coretek 360 engagement does, scaled to the hardware and the sites involved.
- Pickup from the dock in tracked vehicles, under a documented chain of custody
- Every asset logged by serial number before it was handled
- Drives wiped to NIST 800-88 and verified, or shredded when media could not leave whole
- Equipment with life left tested, refurbished, and resold, with the value itemized
What the organization kept
At the end, the organization received a certificate of data destruction for every drive and a final serialized disposition report recording each asset's make, model, sanitization method, and outcome. That report is what its compliance team keeps for the next audit.
Shredding is performed in house by Coretek 360 and is not yet covered by our R2v3 certificate, which covers data sanitization, test and repair, and the downstream recycling chain. We are actively working to add it.
