147,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
That’s how many bytes of data existed in the world at the end of 2024, 20,000 times more than the total number of grains of sand on Earth. And in this modern Age of Information, that number is rising, with another 402,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes being created every single day.1
As the wealth of data around the world continues to grow, data centers are expanding their capabilities to keep up. Drives of more than 20TB are becoming more common, DDR4 modules are being phased out in favor of DDR5, and GPUs have seen massive improvements in graphics, core counts, and clock speeds. But as data centers upgrade their operations, it creates significant—and often unrealized—opportunities.
Older components may not be able to support the demanding needs of your data center, but they are still viable and valuable for other uses. As you prepare for decommissioning, you need to decide what you’re going to do with the existing hardware you no longer want—and weigh the considerations you need to address when disposing of them.
Sustainability
The rise in e-waste—representing all discarded, donated, or recycled electronics—has become a serious epidemic on the environment, and the problem continues to grow as old drives and modules are shredded. The UN found that a record-breaking 62 million tons of e-waste was generated in 2022, with the expectation that the figure will rise to upward of 82 million tons by the start of the next decade.2 As you develop your decommissioning strategy, you should identify ways you can limit or eliminate your contributions to this environmental crisis.
Retaining, reusing, and recovering the commodities in your data center helps contribute to a circular economy within the data-storage industry and reduces the environmental impact of manufacturing new ones by up to 90 percent.3 The International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI) estimates that every reused hard drive can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by six kilograms.4 To put that into perspective on a larger scale, the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that reusing old hard drives could avoid more than four million metric tons of carbon dioxide over the next 25 years, the equivalent of ten billion miles driven.5
Before you commit to upgrading to all new devices throughout your data center, consider whether you can upgrade in other, more sustainable ways. If an existing hard drive is operating at 50 percent capacity, supplementing it with another hard drive running at 50 percent will restore its capabilities at a fraction of the impact—and cost—of a new drive. And with the right expertise, a service partner can potentially reconfigure or even repair a memory module to revitalize a flagging piece.
Even if the entire device cannot be reused, the parts inside are still usable. Expert technicians can disassemble the components, and the parts within can be recycled. While a new device still needs to be manufactured, reusing these internal parts helps mitigate the environmental impact of the manufacturing process and reduces e-waste.
Sustainability within the data center sphere extends beyond environmentalism; it encompasses an overall approach to ethical business practices, including social and governmental elements. Good people want to work with good people, who want to work with good people, and so on down the line. By incorporating sustainable practices into your operations and ensuring you work with sustainable decommissioning partners, you signal to future customers that you are committed to doing things the right way.
Security
As you prepare for the decommissioning process, you need to ensure your strategy won’t put your data at risk. Destroying your retired hardware is one way to reduce your susceptibility to data leaks, but it’s not the only method—or even the best. Information can still be pulled from fragments of drives, leaving your data vulnerable to malicious actors that want access to it. Fragments as small as 3mm remain readable if the disk is destroyed without first purging the data.
Clearing the device removes the data from all addressable storage locations, which protects against simple data-recovery techniques. Generally, the data will be cleared with the read and write commands on the storage device or by restoring the device to its factory state.
One pass is a good start, but the device should also be purged to ensure data security. Purging the data removes it from all non-addressable locations to protect against more advanced data-recovery techniques. This usually involves issuing an overwrite command from the device, block-erasing the data to destroy it from the memory, or deleting the encryption key permanently. Wiping the information and overwriting any residual data will make data recovery impossible by all known methods while still allowing the device to be resold and reused.
A decommissioning partner can help you build a custom security plan to ensure your specific needs are met and all data-bearing devices are properly cleared and purged to protect your data. The plan should cover the full scope of work, including the quantity of drives and modules your partner would be responsible for sanitizing, a detailed timeline of each phase of the process, and the level of sanitization needed for your hardware.
Occasionally, drives with non-zero data or technical problems can prevent the confirmation of a successful wiping. A decommissioning partner can retest the drives to confirm the problem and, if they are nonfunctional, shred and recycle the impacted drives in line with accepted sustainability standards. This ensures that no device potentially containing data is ever remarketed, resold, or reused and that all drives end up being recycled—not sent to landfills.
After each device has been wiped or responsibly recycled, a certificate of sanitization or certificate of destruction needs to be awarded to verify the permanent destruction of all data from the hardware. These provide proof of your process for various regulatory agencies and future buyers and protect you in the event of an audit.
Certifications and Compliance Standards
Careful due diligence is critical when planning your decommissioning; you need to ensure all regulations and standards are followed. Working with a data center decommissioning partner can help simplify the process—but only if you find one that adheres to industry best practices and requirements. Third-party certifications—which can take months or years to achieve and require regular audits and evaluations—verify that the provider can continually maintain these stringent standards and demonstrate their commitment to upholding industry best practices.
ISO/IEC 27001
The internationally recognized ISO/IEC 27001 standard provides a framework for information-security management systems. It affirms a company’s ability to identify, control, and mitigate potential risks associated with data and infrastructure security across its business operations through rigorous testing and audits. Partnering with an ISO/IEC 27001-certified data center service provider ensures that they have the critical information-security policies and principles to safeguard your data throughout the decommissioning process.
ISO 14001
ISO 14001—another internationally recognized standard within the ISO family—helps companies assess their environmental management system (EMS) and provides a framework for building, maintaining, and improving existing ones. By working with a partner that has adopted and implemented this standard, you ensure that you are minimizing the environmental impact of your decommissioning and complying with the relevant legal regulations. It builds trust within the industry and builds your reputation for taking a proactive approach to environmental concerns within your operations.
R2v3
The Responsible Recycling Standard Version 3, also known as R2v3, establishes the proper procedures for managing the end of life for electronics. It effectively sets the standards that need to be followed when decommissioning, including those for information security, environmental responsibility, and legal compliance.
R2v3 focuses on outcomes rather than processes, emphasizing component reuse and data protection while offering flexibility in how adherents achieve these results. Having an R2v3-certified partner ensures your decommissioning will be done correctly and in compliance with all relevant regulations.
WEEELABEX
The WEEE Label of Excellence guidelines set the European standard for collecting, storing, transporting, treating, and disposing of electrical- and electronic-equipment waste, aligning all processes under one unified standard. It highlights nuanced technical aspects of e-waste disposal and establishes advanced management and reporting practices. Even if you’re outside of Europe, it can be helpful to prioritize partners who follow the WEEELABEX guidelines; it shows that they are dedicated to going above and beyond the minimum required standards.
NIST SP 800-88 R1
The NIST SP 800-88 standard establishes guidelines for safely and securely sanitizing your devices. Originally developed by the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology for governmental use, it has been widely adopted throughout the electronics industry. This standard offers practical steps and detailed advice to ensure the confidentiality of the information under your control.
Decommissioning partners that follow the NIST SP 800-88 standard understand how and when to use each level of data sanitization and the methods to ensure their sanitization efforts are complete. As you work together to build out your data center decommissioning plan, carefully evaluate their sanitization recommendations against these guidelines to determine which level is right for your organization’s needs.
Remarketing
Even though you no longer want or need your retired IT equipment, that doesn’t mean they are worthless. There is still a large and thriving need for used CPUs, GPUs, drives, and memory modules on the open market. In fact, the European remanufacturing sector alone is expected to generate more than USD $110 billion per year by 2030.6
Drives, in particular, offer exceptional opportunities for resale. Many companies continue to look for second-hand drives: They are the most frequently reused component in servers, with almost half of all server hard drives being reused after their initial run.7
Moreover, the market has yet to reach capacity. Less than ten percent of drives being decommissioned by hyperscalers fail to meet the minimum grading standards, meaning large numbers of HDDs and SSDs are being destroyed despite being resalable.
To prepare for remarketing, you will need to take a complete inventory of your hardware—including each asset’s serial number, manufacturer, physical condition, and functionality. The best remarketing partners have the experience, certifications, and network within the data center industry to help you identify and unlock the full value of your retired assets. They can validate, grade, and sort your hardware before packaging and preparing it for remarketing, then leverage their vast, global network of customers for the greatest returns on investment.
Consigning the drives, processors, and modules to your partner after they’ve been securely sanitized frees up warehouse space and simplifies your remarketing plans. You don’t have to worry about finding the right buyers or processing the outgoing shipments; it’s all handled for you as the natural end of your commodities’ lifecycles.
Even if you prefer to retain control of your devices after decommissioning and resell them independently, a partner can help you market the devices through their network of potential buyers and offer their expert knowledge of the value of your devices.
Simplify Your Process by Partnering With a Data Center Services Expert
Once you have thoroughly reviewed your top priorities, begin researching potential partners to help you through your data center’s lifecycle refresh. Look for experts who will handle the entire process for you, from the planning stage through remarketing and reselling. They should be willing to create a custom, innovative, and scalable decommissioning plan specific to your needs and goals, including wiping the data on site, if that’s what you prefer.
When you begin interviewing different data center service teams, ask them about their certifications, security protocols, and sustainable practices. The more information you can gather about their operations, the more confident you will feel in the success of your decommissioning process.
As you work through the decommissioning process with your partner, be sure to observe their progress through regular reporting. Many data center service partners offer custom API integrations tailored to your unique requirements for automatic and transparent updates.
Decommissioning your data center is a large undertaking—if you do it alone and don’t properly prepare. Equipped with the necessary tools, resources, and expertise, a trusted partner can help you remarket the retired commodities in your data center, unlock potential profits, and contribute to a sustainable and environmentally friendly circular economy.
Parker Deardorff leads Smith’s data center services program and oversees business initiatives focused on sustainability and circular-economy principles. With more than two decades of experience developing custom programs and effective, long-term solutions for Smith’s customers, Parker has earned numerous recognitions as a top-level sales professional and industry leader.