A Glimpse Inside Google's South Carolina Data Center

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."

Comments

Amazon's East Coast Data Center

[0100010001010011]

Amazon also released photos of their East Coast datacenter today.

I want a video of Amazon's data center

[jbplou]

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

Ultimate Security

[ThePromenader]

...of course there's no better way to protect your data - my basement door is securely locked, and I shred my HD's daily. And mom rarely lets anyone past the front door.

Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste.

[chebucto]

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.

Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste.

[nacturation]

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.

If the hard drive had any bad sectors which were automatically reallocated from the pool of spare sectors, your "accidental" zeroing of the sectors would not have cleared those. Therefore, there is the potential for some data recovery even if it's only a few kilobytes at a time. Additionally, it's impossible to visually tell the difference between a drive with all data intact and a drive that had been zeroed out. Shredding the drive removes all doubt as to its status.

Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...

Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste.

[Seumas]

Yeah, sure. Google will just invent a hard-drive disassembling, sorting, and recycling robot. Are you fucking nuts? What's next, Google will just invent some self-driving robot car?!

Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste.

[Anonymous Coward]

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. :-)

Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste.

[Animats]

Google probably shreds them so that they don't get bought by some low-rent operator and show up in "new" machines.

They're low-end drives, incidentally. Google uses cheap parts and redundancy, accepting that hardware will fail regularly. I'm surprised they even bother to test failed drives.

Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste.

[JWSmythe]

    I knew someone in the IT recycling business. They had some big customers interested in security, such as the DoD. They had a machine much larger than the one shown, which would shred anything put into it. The guarantee was that every piece that came out would have no dimension larger than 0.25 inches.

    They sold this mixed scrap metal to other companies who had methods for sorting the various metals out, and then they were paid based on the total metals. This included sending off electronics for their precious metals. They made some good money from the precious metals contained within the electronics, although they were impractical to separate on a small scale.

    I didn't quite get the Google demonstration on their destruction of a drive. First they wipe it, verify it's wiped, bend the plates, and then shred it? Why? It would save a lot of time and manpower to just shred them.

    I work for a company now that is under strict guidelines, both by contracts with 3rd parties and federal law. There are stacks of old unserviceable hard drives (don't work, and are generally under 40GB). are currently kept in a safe. The agreement I've come to with everyone is that we will be melting them down. A little (say 5 pounds) of home-brew thermite, and we'll have a nice chunk of molten metal to give to a recycler. If done properly, you wouldn't recognize any piece of it as being a drive when we're done. Good luck trying to recover from *that*. :)

Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste.

[DaveGod]

I didn't quite get the Google demonstration on their destruction of a drive. First they wipe it, verify it's wiped, bend the plates, and then shred it? Why? It would save a lot of time and manpower to just shred them.

Shredding requires extremely noisy machinery and therefore it would not be practical to hold it in the most secure area where the drives are kept. The shredding is probably a redundant step, partially to catch any screwups and partially just to allow customers to tick off the "shreds drive" requirement box.

I'd expect the scrap would also be worth a lot more, just having run it through a fragmenter can double the value per ton.

If you thermite your drives I'd assume you'll end up with a not-so-nice chunk of all the drive materials melted together. Shredding the drives like in the Google video is essentially putting it through a fragmenter, stage 1 of standard recycling processing. Magnets can then be used to separate out the ferrous metals, and so on.

That's nice and all.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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).

Re:That's nice and all.

[Jeremi]

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.

Re:That's nice and all.

[Guspaz]

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.

Hard drives need upgraded

[drmacinyasha]

Did anyone else notice in the video at 00:53 that the guy is assembling the server... With an IDE hard drive?

Re:Hard drives need upgraded

[Mashiki]

What's wrong with IDE? You can pick up crates of 500gb drives for dirt cheap these days, about half the cost of what a SATA will cost, about a 1/3 of the cost of scsi, and about a 1/10th the cost of fibre channel.

Re:Hard drives need upgraded

[proxima]

It would be a fail to think they would store anything needed on such servers, other than os. The servers are probably linked to a harddrive farm by network or fiber-channel.

Wrong. Google stores its data all over the place, including on each individual server. They designed their own networked filesystem for the purpose. If they really didn't store data locally, they'd almost certainly PXE boot and avoid drives on each server altogether. I suspect the video just used some dated footage (from a training or other internal video perhaps?), as this article clearly shows SATA drives. Every server has two drives, and since no one node is critical for anything they also wouldn't bother with RAID1 for an OS boot drive as you suggest.

Re:Hard drives need upgraded

[hanshotfirst]

None of which matter in Google's general architecture. It's not like they're running a bunch of W2k8 RAID5 servers. Everything is massively redundant and replaceable.

Re:Hard drives need upgraded

[Mashiki]

If you're pulling the entire rack when it fails, non-hotpluggable doesn't matter too much especially in terms of redundancy.

Re:Serious question:

[moonbender]

Revealed: Google’s new mega data center in Finland