Even though they do not design or sell any hardware or firmware, Chia Network has announced they have joined the Open Compute Project, started by Facebook as “project Freedom”. JM Hands, VP of Storage at Chia Network has written a blog post detailing their reasons for joining and what they hope to accomplish out of it.
The main gist of the post is that because Chia has storage experts (true) and an incentive to help people recycle hard drives they have a unique perspective to bring to the OCP. They detail some of the ideas in the blog post about leveraging secure erase to avoid creating so much datacenter e-waste from destroyed HDDs following NIST recommendations. Go read the post, it’s quite a bit longer than this. Thanks to Speedmann for pointing it out to me.
It sounds like a worthy goal, and would definitely reduce a lot of waste. I personally have shredded 100s of drives, and I don’t even work at a datacenter anymore. The only thing he isn’t accounting for is how fun it is to run those drives through the shredder. It’s going to be hard convincing people to give that up entirely.
