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Technical reference · 5 chapters
The Decommissioning Handbook
Everything we get asked twice, written down properly. Aimed at whoever has been handed the project — infrastructure leads, DC managers, and the person who inherited a hall nobody documented.
Planning a decommission
The whole project in seven phases, in the order that causes fewest problems.
- Before you touch anything
- Capturing the assets
- Deciding what happens to the data
- Getting it valued
- Planning the physical removal
- +3 more
Sanitisation standards
NIST 800-88 Clear, Purge and Destroy — what each means and which suits which media.
- What NIST 800-88 is
- The three categories
- Technique follows media
- The three-pass myth
- Verification is not optional
- +2 more
Flash and SSD erasure
Why overwriting an SSD can leave your data intact, and what actually works.
- The problem in one sentence
- Wear levelling
- Over-provisioning
- Why multi-pass is worse than useless
- What actually works
- +4 more
Data beyond the drives
Six places data survives a drive wipe — BMCs, boot modules, cache, switches, firewalls, controllers.
- Management controllers
- Boot modules and internal flash
- RAID controller cache
- Switches and routers
- Firewalls and VPN appliances
- +2 more
Legal duties and evidence
UK GDPR for the data, duty of care for the waste, and the records that prove both.
- Part one: the data
- Part two: the waste
- The evidence pack
Asset list template XLSX
The spreadsheet referenced throughout chapter 01. Dropdowns, worked examples, and a sheet explaining what drives price. No email required.
Sample certificates
The documents the handbook keeps referring to — erasure, storage array and network equipment sanitisation, as actually issued.
Why this exists
Most of it started as an email
Someone asks whether a three-pass wipe is enough, or what happens to the switch configs, and the answer turns out to be four paragraphs long. Easier to write it down once. If it saves you a call, good — and if it doesn’t, you know where we are.