Data Center FAQs

How do I prepare decommissioned equipment for pick up?

As shown in the adjacent diagram, SLS offers onsite data center decommissioning, inventory counts, data destruction, lease returns and packing and shipping of retired assets.

Some data centers opt to do this work themselves and engage SLS to pick up the equipment, which we then send to one of our processing facilities and prepare assets for resale or recycling. When scoping work between the data center employees and SLS, consider:

• Do you want SLS to decommission assets? Do you have a grid map of asset locations?
• Do you have a list of data center assets that will be shipped to SLS?
• Is the list accurate and complete? If you need serial number reporting for each asset, you will save a lot of headaches if you have an accurate list to reconcile any asset reporting you receive from SLS.
• Do you know which equipment has resale value?
• What reports will be needed by your IT department? By your accounting department? By risk managers? By your data privacy officer?
• Have you identified which equipment will be recycled?
• How are you managing data bearing assets? Will data be destroyed prior to shipping? Will hard drives be removed? If not, it is important that equipment is securely shipped to ensure you have full accountability for any data center assets with data. You may find this information useful when thinking about how to manage data bearing assets:

Methods to destroy data on hard drives

Data destruction vendor selection

• Do you have lease returns? When will the lease expire? How will you remove data on leased equipment? Will lessor manage the returns?
• Do you have different types of equipment to ship?  SLS offers packing instructions for different IT equipment including servers, laptops and notebooks, mobile phones, hard drives, monitors, accessories, networking equipment and computer parts.  These are available as pdfs and videos. Click to view instructions on how to pack IT assets.

Once prep work is completed, your equipment will be picked up and shipped to a SLS processing center.  Depending on your instructions, we will prepare your equipment to be resold, destroy data on data bearing assets and recycle obsolete or broken equipment.  We will provide required reporting to you to provide a final audit trail of how equipment was disposed.