Blancco LUN Eraser

Blancco launched its latest solution for the secure erasure of data within live storage environments.

With worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services forecast to reach US$55.5 billion by 2014, data centers will be entrusted with more information than ever before. In this rapidly emerging cloud computing environment, data centers need secure, cost-effective options for reusing enterprise storage systems without rebuilding them. For safe reuse of these costly and complex systems, Blancco offers LUN Eraser, a centralized tool that can erase logical drives like LUNs in a live storage environment where the host computer cannot be rebooted.

"Not only does Blancco LUN Eraser sustain data center compliance with a wide range of policies and regulations like PCI DSS, it can simultaneously erase data on 200 or more logical units through remote management from an application server," said Markku Willgren, President of Blancco’s US Operations. "For external data centers and internal corporate users alike, this concurrent erasure expedites data removal and improves productivity, while also providing detailed erasure reports for audit purposes."

Blancco LUN Eraser erases logical and physical drives detected by UNIX and Windows operating systems. It shreds the drive by overwriting the entire writeable area, sector by sector, according to a process chosen from among all major government and industry overwriting standards, as required by the user. The automatically generated report, which documents details like the LUN identifier and date, time, and technician for the erasure, can be uploaded to Blancco Management Console or emailed as a PDF.

Blancco LUN Eraser protects data
at vulnerable transition points
Blancco LUN Eraser supports both corporate users with data centers and external storage providers in their efforts to meet increasingly strict regulations and internal data security policies that mandate data destruction. Common scenarios that require erasure of LUNs and associated documentation include:

• PCI DSS compliance – The Payment Card Data Security Standard requires that customer data is not stored more than five years. At the end of this period, the data must be securely erased and the process thoroughly documented.
• Disaster recovery test – Disaster recovery tests are necessary to ensure a high availability data center environment. During these tests, LUN data is replicated and must be erased afterwards for security reasons, with appropriate documentation to prove its removal.
• End-of-hosting subscription – In a cloud computing environment, customers may come and go. Erasure is necessary for LUN reuse in a hosted environment when a current customer leaves and a new user is assigned to an existing LUN.