Equipment disposal: what has to be tracked, and what can simply be recycled
Sorting equipment by type is intuitive. Sorting it by risk is what determines the paperwork, and therefore the price.
Three risk classes, not five equipment types
- Data-bearing. Drives, arrays, some network gear with persistent configuration, and anything with onboard flash. Requires serial-level tracking and evidence.
- Regulated material. Batteries, refrigerants, certain electronic components. Requires proper handling and recycling documentation.
- Plain material. Racks, rails, empty chassis, copper. Requires nothing beyond a weight ticket.
Most cost overruns come from equipment moved between the first and the third class after the fact — usually a device nobody realized held configuration data.
The devices people forget
- Out-of-band management controllers holding credentials.
- Load balancers and firewalls with stored configurations and certificates.
- KVM appliances and console servers.
- Printers and scanners in adjacent office space swept into the same project.
- Spare drives in a cabinet nobody inventoried.
What evidence to keep
List the equipment
A rough inventory is enough to start. Providers will tell you which classes drive the paperwork.
Data Center Exit is an independent project-intake and matching platform. It does not perform decommissioning, equipment removal, data destruction or transport.