A New Way to Decommission Servers
New servers bring efficiency gains, but old gear doesn’t vanish when the new machines are onboarded. The old servers are often still functional and valuable, but it’s not the best idea to just let them sit in your data centers. If left unmanaged, they waste space, pose security risks, and might end up in landfills. The alternative is secure server decommissioning: restoring used machines to factory condition so they can be reused, resold, or safely transferred.
Common headaches include:
- Manual BIOS and BMC resets that don’t fully clear credentials
- High fees from third-party disposal services
- Risk of incomplete disk wipes
With faster refresh cycles and GPU adoption, enterprises must securely retire hardware more often, so it’s best to have a process set up when it’s time to switch out servers.
The Challenge in Automating Server Decommissioning
Decommissioning strips away your access. After wiping passwords, clearing TPM keys, and resetting firmware, traditional tools lose the ability to manage the system, making it difficult to automate in-house. This forces many IT teams into costly manual or outsourced processes.
Digital Rebar v4.15 addresses this by preserving machine identity and enabling out-of-the-box workflows that complete the reset while still allowing machine management.
Prefer video? Here’s our video on this process:
How It Works
Automated decommissioning with Digital Rebar includes:
- System Cleaning: Clear TPM keys, break RAID, reset BIOS and firmware, remove BMC users and certificates.
- Disk Scrubbing: Built-in wipes or integrations with Blancco for NSA-grade erasure.
- Verification: Reboot to confirm factory state, with optional certification via Eclypsium.
- Record Keeping: Logs and certificates for compliance and resale documentation.
Use Cases
- Secondary Market: Recover value by selling certified-clean servers.
- Internal Transfer: Resetting machines when moving them between teams or tenants.
- Data Center Cleanup: Freeing space quickly while documenting compliance.
Each scenario benefits from automation that removes human error and reduces turnaround time.
How Digital Rebar Decommissions Servers Differently
Digital Rebar handles the full hardware lifecycle, from provisioning new machines to decommissioning older ones in the same automation platform. That means the same platform that brings systems into production can also return them to factory settings when they are no longer needed, letting you avoid single-solution tools for each task in the lifecycle.
Security is not limited to the vendor’s factory reset. The process removes accounts, credentials, and certificates that are often left behind, ensuring that machines can be reused or transferred without risk of data leakage.
The system also provides a way to certify the reset. Integrations with verification tools confirm that disks are scrubbed and credentials removed, creating the records needed for compliance reporting or resale assurance. For many enterprises, the resale value of securely cleaned servers can offset the entire cost of the software license.
Next Steps
Decommissioning doesn’t have to so costly. With the right automation, it becomes a secure, value-generating operation. For more on how Digital Rebar can bring big process improvements, take a look at the Digital Rebar page. And if you’re curious what else was added in Digital Rebar v4.15, read our release summary.
Schedule a demo today to learn more.
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