openstack team mailing list archive

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2012 at 11:17:13AM +0200, Heber Dijks wrote:
> When terminating a volume, openstack default overwrites the complete volume
> with zero’s for security reasons. This can take a long time, especially
> with large volumes.
> 
> If security isn’t an issue in your environment, you can speed-up deletion
> to only overwrite the first 1GB with zero’s, which will then delete only
> the mbr, partition table and the first part of the filesystem.
> 
> See this post (
> https://dijks.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/how-to-speedup-removal-of-a-volume/)
> for a brief tutorial to speed-up removal of a volume if security isn't an
> issue.

On the flipside if security /is/ your concern, then you may well consider
fill-with-zeros to be insufficient.  The ability to invoke the 'scrub'
command, would be quite desirable. It sounds like Nova really ought to
have this be all configurable, to choose between none, zeros, or one of
the many 'scrub' algorithms.

Regards,
Daniel
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