Netezza Decommissioning Service

If you have an old Netezza system that needs to be decommissioned, consider recycling it rather than stripping it down to be broken up and destroyed.

Decommissioning your Netezza System

If you have a Netezza system that you are ready to decommission, you have two broad alternatives:
1. Strip down your appliance to be broken up and destroyed.
2. Recycle your appliance either as a functioning unit (i.e. to be repurposed) or to be dismantled for spare parts.

In either case, your system contains a lot of data, some of it highly sensitive, that needs to be destroyed. Some organisations will remove the hard drives and destroy them, others will opt to erase their data securely.

It can be a time consuming process to completely and securely erase all the data and to revert the system to its original 'factory settings'. Furthermore, physically dismantling your system may be more labor intensive and costly than offloading it as a fully operational unit.

What is the Smart Associates Netezza Decommissioning Service?

Our service results in your old Netezza system being easily and immediately reused and recycled - rather than having to be stripped down, broken up, and destroyed.

When we decommission a system we:

  • Securely erase all the data in all the databases, at the physical device level i.e. in such a way that it is forensically unrecoverable. Note this is not the same thing as issuing a simple logical ‘drop database’ SQL command, which would not achieve this. It takes a good 6-12 hours to overwrite every single block of data multiple times with random information in order to achieve this.
  • Re-initialise the database back to its original ‘factory settings’ - so that any customer specific information regarding users, groups, passwords, permissions, etc are all permanently removed
  • Completely remove any non-standard settings, directories, or files at the Linux system level - including things like users, NFS shares, sendmail configuration settings, Host names, LDAP settings, etc.

Further Information

If you would like to learn more, contact us here and we'll get in touch.