DOD wipe fibre channel drives with CX-2PDAE

Looking at the pictures you need hssdc2 cables.

Thanks for your reply rewalmilo.

This is a service I need to supply. There are some companies there that want to reuse the hard drives but they need to be sure the drives were wiped out and certificate that. Thats the reason I need to find a way to do it.

That cooper hba (qla2200/66) have the hssdc2 connection ou hsscd? In this case I need that hba and two cables right? need to connect both EXP PRX ?

The hba is PCI-X so I will need a server to be able to connect it, it will be impossible in a desktop.

Thanks

Hello,

This is not so easy. The EMC DAE is using the fc protocol via cooper cables. You HBA is the optical version. You need HSSDC cables and a hba with a hssdc port. Something like a qla2200 (not the qla2200F).

Considering the age of the DAE and the difficulties to get an fc/cooper hba would it not be more cost effective to mechanically destroy the drives?

Regards

Are you intending to re-purpose these drives in another system?  The drives for the 2PDAE are getting pretty old, might be best to just physically destroy them, unless you find an EMC system to connect the shelf to, then you could zero them via naviseccli.  You could also try to sell them, and ensure secure transit to someone who has the hardware to wipe them. 

Hello,

Thanks for your reply.

Drives are not mine, this is a rare service asked by some companies and I need to be able to supply the service.

I have hardware to wipe them but is slow because I can connect just 1 drive each time.. this is really slow as I have around 200 to wipe.

What kind of EMC system I need to connect this enclosure and be able to wipe 15 drives at same time? What is the cost of this equipments? Or is there a simple and cheaper way to do it?

Thanks

Hello,

-You need only 1 HBA connected to one LCC pri port , you don’t need to connect to the second LCC .

-The QLA 2200 has a HSSDC connector. But be care full the QLA2200 was just an example. It is a 1 Gig HBA and you have 2 GIG drives

Regards

Hello rewalmilo

Thanks for your reply.

I found this card in eBay; QLogic QLA2200 66 1GBIT 64bit Fibre Channel HBA Adapter FC0210406 DP N 0001280R | eBay

I tried to find 2GBIT similar card but I just find with LC connector.

1 GBIT card will not work at all? It will be incompatible or will just affect the access velocity?

Thanks

Be careful if you try a JBOD route like that, for one thing that HBA you pictured has an HSSDC connector, whereas the shelf you have has HSSDC2.  There is such a thing as an HSSDC-HSSDC2 cable though. 

When we wipe EMC drives, we generally use a pretty basic CX array, like a CX3-10 or CX4-120, but anything in the CX3 or CX4 line works fine for this purpose.  The hard part is having a spare head unit on hand to perform wipes with, otherwise you've got to leave empty space in a production system, carefully select which disks to zero so you don't blow away a production LUN, etc.  (I think most newish FLARE revisions prevent you from doing this, but still, always good to be careful!)

Hello,

There is maybe(!!!!) a other solution workaround.

Do you have access to a fibre channel switch? Then try to get hold of a cable called EMC sfp to hssdc2 cable.

For example www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-EMC-038-003-505-SFP-to-HSSDC2-5M-Fiber-Cable-/301567063715?hash=item4636cc36a3:g:hJMAAOSwpDdVCbdh

When you plug the SFP side into the switch instead of a normal gbic you should see the drives in the DAE as N-L (Fibre Channel loop connected device).

Then you should be able to zone the devices to any normal optical connected hba/server.

Hello,

You are saying a switch like this one? Brocade Silkworm 3200 8 Port Fiber Channel Gigabit Switch Netzwerk Switch | eBay

The idea is to detect the DEA as NAS device? by the network?

Hello,

Now you are mixing things up. We are talking about a fibre channel san switch. San stands for storage area network.

Each physical disk in the dae will turn up as a fibre channel device in the switch when connected. Then you can create a zone between the hba and this devices. Then the host should recognize them as scsi disks.

But if you are not familiar with FC/SAN basics it will be a steep learning curve.

The switch will do but it comes without gbics. Aside of the sfp/hssdc2 cable you need at least one gbic to connect the hba.

Regards

Michael

One question for clarification.

You want the secure erase the disks and then repurpose them ? Keep in mind that the disks are formatted with 520 bytes per sector. When you reformat them from windows with 512 bytes per sector you can use them as normal drives but a clarion array will not recognize them any more.

Hello

I don´t need to format them in windows, I just need to fill all drive with 00 (zeros). Using standard software for that will not change the sector size I think.

As I told I´m not experienced at all with FC/SAN basics and as I see its a bit hard to find out some information about it. I see this will not be easy for me to do without some support.

Hello one more time guys.

I found out that I have this fibre channel db9 hba(as the images below). My question is if I can use a cable like this New 2M Sanmina Sci Fibre Wire Cable DB9 to HSSDC | eBay  and be able to detect the drives in the enclosure or if is not that easy??

Thanks for your help

The level of support that you can get on this forum will probably be limited as most of us do not use the DAE's without the EMC Storage Processors as part of the configuration.

What you're suggesting is to take a DAE that contains disks and connect that DAE over Fibre Channel to a Fiber Channel controller in the Windows server then run the DOD erase program.

The older DAE's have two link control cards as the interface to the DAE. Each LCC connects to each disk and each disk has two ports.This is a fiber channel arbitrated loop connection inside of the DAE. It's possible from what I've heard (there have been a couple of people on this forum ask the same question and I remember one person was able to get this working, but he also knew a lot about fiber channel) that you could connect the DAE to an HBA in a host and somehow get that working. I'm betting that most of us have not tried this.

glen