[Beowulf] Data Destruction

[Paul Edmon]

I guess the question is for a parallel filesystem how do you make sure 
you have 0'd out the file with out borking the whole filesystem since 
you are spread over a RAID set and could be spread over multiple hosts.

-Paul Edmon-

On 9/29/2021 10:32 AM, Scott Atchley wrote:
> For our users that have sensitive data, we keep it encrypted at rest 
> and in movement.
>
> For HDD-based systems, you can perform a secure erase per NIST 
> standards. For SSD-based systems, the extra writes from the secure 
> erase will contribute to the wear on the drives and possibly their 
> eventually wearing out. Most SSDs provide an option to mark blocks as 
> zero without having to write the zeroes. I do not think that it is 
> exposed up to the PFS layer (Lustre, GPFS, Ceph, NFS) and is only 
> available at the ext4 or XFS layer.
>
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 10:15 AM Paul Edmon <pedmon at cfa.harvard.edu 
> <mailto:pedmon at cfa.harvard.edu>> wrote:
>
>     The former.  We are curious how to selectively delete data from a
>     parallel filesystem.  For example we commonly use Lustre, ceph,
>     and Isilon in our environment.  That said if other types allow for
>     easier destruction of selective data we would be interested in
>     hearing about it.
>
>     -Paul Edmon-
>
>     On 9/29/2021 10:06 AM, Scott Atchley wrote:
>>     Are you asking about selectively deleting data from a parallel
>>     file system (PFS) or destroying drives after removal from the
>>     system either due to failure or system decommissioning?
>>
>>     For the latter, DOE does not allow us to send any non-volatile
>>     media offsite once it has had user data on it. When we are done
>>     with drives, we have a very big shredder.
>>
>>     On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 9:59 AM Paul Edmon via Beowulf
>>     <beowulf at beowulf.org <mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>> wrote:
>>
>>         Occassionally we get DUA (Data Use Agreement) requests for
>>         sensitive
>>         data that require data destruction (e.g. NIST 800-88). We've
>>         been
>>         struggling with how to handle this in an era of distributed
>>         filesystems
>>         and disks.  We were curious how other people handle requests
>>         like this?
>>         What types of filesystems to people generally use for this
>>         and how do
>>         people ensure destruction?  Do these types of DUA's preclude
>>         certain
>>         storage technologies from consideration or are there creative
>>         ways to
>>         comply using more common scalable filesystems?
>>
>>         Thanks in advance for the info.
>>
>>         -Paul Edmon-
>>
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