The Disk Cleaning & Sanitization issue:
Recently a growing number of customers have been asking us to help them SANITIZE their disks after they retire their storage equipment. We do this with our proprietary solution for a daily on site rate, because we can never tell going in how many hours it will take to cleanse all the disks in the FC arrays. I hope to have a forum on this during the next Disaster Recovery conference, because I am not the only one who considers the possibility of private data getting into the wrong hands a disaster!
The Wikipedia actually has very good summary of the problem and this piece is really interesting to many customers we speak with:
The bad track problem
Here are two links that address the issues :
http://www.hipaadvisory.com/tech/disksan.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence
What is your corporate policy on excess equipment and disk sanitization?