Wisetek, an Irish technology company, has erased and destroyed 14 million data storage devices in the past eight years. And its founder, Jim Sheehan, says it’s just getting started.

The company, based in Cork in Ireland, describes itself as an “IT asset disposition” provider than specialises in secure data destruction, reuse and technology manufacturing services and has facilities across the world.

Sheehan, who is in Johannesburg this week for the Pan-African Data Centres Conference, says he was inspired to start the company after working at EMC, an enterprise storage company now owned by Dell Technologies, where he was involved in taking back leased equipment at the end of contracts.

He quickly spotted an opportunity in the market and, after 16 years with his former employer, created Wisetek – having first established a contract with EMC to retrieve and recycle its old equipment.

The introduction of directives by the EU, under the General Data Protection Regulation, also created opportunities for the company.

Wisetek specialises in total data destruction, using US National Security Agency-approved “disintegrators” to destroy any data on storage like solid-state drives and ensure that confidential data remains confidential.

Sheehan says the company aims in this way to establish a “circular economy”, concentrating on data sanitisation, refurbishing and recovery, although the company also destroys drives at the request of clients.

Hyperscale cloud operators typically want everything “broken into dust” so there can be no data leaks, he says.

Google

Not only is secure data destruction assured but IT asset disposition, re-use and technology manufacturing services are also offered in the US, Ireland, the UK, the Middle East and Africa, and Thailand.

Wisetek is working with Google on destroying data and refurbishing drives. In 2020, Google drafted supply-chain contracts prioritising and accepting secondary use materials. From 2022, Google plans to build 100% of its consumer electronics products with recycled content.

It is also working to achieve zero waste from data centres – 91% of materials handled by Wisetek are diverted from landfill sites. At least 19% of newly deployed servers are remanufactured devices and nearly 2.1 million units were remarketed into the secondary market for re-use.

Google manages the manufacturing and assembly operations of its custom-built servers, with components including the CPU, motherboard, flash devices, hard disks and memory modules. Its repair process at its data centres enables longer life expectancies because, as servers fail and need repair, defective parts are replaced by refurbished parts, allowing for longer use.

Wisetek employs robots in its clients’ data centre that cut into storage devices to extract neodymium – a rare-earth metal attached to the iron-oxide panels in every hard drive and mined mostly in Russia and China – to salvage it. Traces of platinum and gold are also salvaged.

The company is keen to break into the African market, where demand for cheaper servers is “huge”, but in the volumes required to make it profitable, Sheehan says the cost of delivery would be prohibitive for small orders.

“The refurbished units would have to be sent in containers to a South African port and then, for instance, to go to Rwanda by road freight would have to pass through two customs unions. There are lots of obstacles in the way, but it is not out of the question.” — © 2023 NewsCentral Media