topic Re: Sanitize entire netapp cluster in ONTAP Discussions

Sanitize entire netapp cluster

tekievb — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 12:42:09 GMT

All the discussions/questions I have found related to disk sanitize have helped but thought I would post a new question to see if anyone has over the years done the process and will share with updated results.

I have a remote customer datacenter that is being shutdown. They have a six node cluster with a mixture of SSD and NL-SAS <7200 rpm> disks. We are working out a schedule when everything can be destroyed and the drives sanitized. Customer wants to ensure all data is securely wiped, not to DOD standards necessarily but better than just zeroing the drives.

Drives are 3.5TB SSD and 3.7TB NL-SAS

DOT 9.x

Thanks for any update information shared!

tekievb

Re: Sanitize entire netapp cluster

SpindleNinja — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 16:13:06 GMT

For a non-DoD, I would just delete all data aggrs, zero out all the disks. decomm the cluster and re-init all HA pairs.

I don't think there is a middle ground that I can think of though. Could zero them out a few times maybe?

Re: Sanitize entire netapp cluster

tekievb — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 16:23:00 GMT

SpindleNinja, Thank you for taking the time to respond.

The customer is requesting that all drives be sanitized, so just doing the zeroing of the drives is not an option. Sorry I did not include that in my initial post.

Re: Sanitize entire netapp cluster

SpindleNinja — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 17:46:46 GMT

no problem, sanitize is pretty straightforward.

https://docs.netapp.com/ontap-9/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.netapp.doc.dot-cm-psmg%2FGUID-BE1AF56B-40DD-4C42-99D6-76EEC9225DC5.html

Re: Sanitize entire netapp cluster

tekievb — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 18:02:00 GMT

The link you sent does not work correctly. The link you shared does it provide estimated times that the process takes?

I was hoping NetApp has internal documentation that would tell me how long the sanitization would take, that would be shareable.

Re: Sanitize entire netapp cluster

tekievb — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 18:05:09 GMT

Also in the documentation it states that some ontap commands are no longer valid once the sanitize option is enabled. Is there a list stating what commands are affected?

See below:

When disk sanitization is enabled, it disables some ONTAP commands. After disk sanitization is enabled on a node, it cannot be disabled

Re: Sanitize entire netapp cluster

SpindleNinja — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 18:56:04 GMT

Speeds can vary, it's treated like a background process so if you have nothing running on the cluster, it should go pretty fast. The larger SATA drives will be slower than SAS/SSD.

From what I can find these are the commands that get disabled once it gets enabled.

dd (to copy blocks of data)
dumpblock (to print dumps of disk blocks)
setflag wafl_metadata_visible (to allow access to internal WAFL files)

Couple other links for you:

https://library.netapp.com/ecmdocs/ECMP12458210/html/GUID-BE1AF56B-40DD-4C42-99D6-76EEC9225DC5.html

https://kb.netapp.com/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/1028718