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A Glimpse Inside Google's South Carolina Data Center

Posted by timothy on from the live-from-coast-zero dept.

miller60 writes "Google today released a video showcasing the security and data protection practices in its data centers. Filmed at the company's South Carolina data center, it provides a look at Google's wiping of data and (literal) shredding of hard drives."

8 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. I want a video of Amazon's data center by jbplou · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I want a video of Amazon's data center about 36 hours ago instead.

  2. Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Call every data recovery company you can find and ask them the following:

    "I have a hard drive which was zeroed out, with one pass, accidentally. Can you recover the data for me?"

    You will not find a single "yes" answer. It's impossible. It's a myth, or a theoretical attack.

    Maybe the CIA should worry about stuff like this, but you shouldn't, and Google really shouldn't. Those hard drives could be reused or recycled.

    1. Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste. by chebucto · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They're only being discarded because they've started to fail. So giving them away would be a bit of a dick move, regardless of whether it's a privacy threat or not.

      As for the shredding, my bet would be that they're just following a data-destruction spec from 10-20 years ago, when wiping really wasn't a surefire way to destroy data.

      --
      The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
    2. Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'd be curious to know if (once a drive is dead or failing) shredding reduces its value, or whether any recycling procedure would just start with shredding anyway. A pile of shredded drive chunks should be substantially richer in copper, nickel, rare earths, aluminum, and iron(and possibly gold) than many ores considered to be commercially viable. I imagine that it comes down to whether it is cheaper to get a cleaner separation at the cost more labor, or just grind 'em up and let the refining process sort it out...

    3. Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      A very, very common failure mode for a hard drive is that it continues working until either the electronics or the mechanics of the drive fails. At this point, it's too late to zero it out.

      Now that it has failed, how does one erase it? Well, one can either try to put the platters in a new enclosure with fresh mechanics and fresh electronics...

      or one can destroy it.

      Guess which one is cheaper. :-)

  3. That's nice and all. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So, hands up anyone whose privacy concerns RE:Google had to do with people stealing hard drives or breaking into datacenters, rather than Google mining them...

    Anybody, anybody? Bueller?

    Sure, the fact that the datacenter isn't a shack with no access controls is nice; but mostly from an uptime and efficiency perspective. When it comes to large web players, Google definitely among them, physical attackers are so far down the list of information security concerns that they might as well not rate(for the users, that is. Obviously the operators would face significant costs if people were breaking in and grabbing stuff all the time).

    1. Re:That's nice and all. by Jeremi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So, hands up anyone whose privacy concerns RE:Google had to do with people stealing hard drives or breaking into datacenters, rather than Google mining them...

      You and I might not worry about that, but keep in mind Google is trying to convince government and industry to outsource much of their internal email and other IT operations to Google's servers. I'd imagine they would like to be reassured that nobody will walk in and grab their confidential data.

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    2. Re:That's nice and all. by Guspaz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Data center robberies are actually rather common, so physical attackers should definitely be pretty high up on the list. A google search for "data center robbery" turns up tons of results. One particularly bad offender is C I Host, who had their data center broken into four times in three years. At least one of those times, someone cut through the wall of the datacenter to gain access. Other times, well, it turns out that pointing a gun at someone is a rather good way to get around all that fancy security.