There are a bunch of good posts here, but most people are jumping to solution without knowing some pretty important requirements.

1) How important are the backups ? Is your system backup failure rate is 1% is that ok ? How many backups can fail, affects how much effort you need to put into the validation you need to do to make sure that you've got every backup. I'd suggest you should use whatever you use for regular backups, automate the agent installation and removal - this way you can plug into your regular corporate backup system - and avoid creating a whole load of bespoke process.

2) How important is it that you wipe 100% of the disks ? if your wipe failure rate is 1% is that ok ? (as above - if the answer is no, then you need to put the correct amount of effort into the validation that you've wiped the disk, and into creating an audit trail to prove the wiping was done).

3) Are there certain machines you really, really need to have copies of and make sure are wiped ? eg the CXO's ? If you make sure the really important ones are dealt with, can you accept a higher failure rate on the others ?

There are a number of good posts on here, and a lot of people saying "use DBAN".

99.99% of the problem space here is the process that proves the drive was wiped and the processes supporting that, 0.01% is doing the wiping.

2000 usd per access point from the look of the link.

You've got this totally wrong - Greece has a HUGE government, AND low taxes. I'm pretty sure no US party is advocating that.

For example, Greeks get state pensions at 55 at 90% of earnings, and at 50 if you are in one of 580 hazardous professions (for example if you cut people's hair). In some situations, children can inherit their parents state pension when their parents die !

Plus no one pays any Taxes and the Greeks have spent the last 10 years running up debts to keep everything running, so now interest rates have gone up they are fucked.

Alex

Do whats right for you. The company will survive without you - and if it won't the owners of the company are foolish for not looking after you better, and they don't deserve your loyalty.

As a couple of people on here have said, the 90m back each day could be worth much more than the 7k from a quality of life perspective.

Plus I bet its only 90m on a good day, I bet you have days when its 90m each way !

That 90m per day represents 7.5 hours of your time per week.

Consider that you work 40 hours per week, and if you sleep 8 hours per night you sleep 56 hours per week and that the week is only 168 hours long.

168 - 40 - 56 = 72

So all this means if you get 7.5 hours back you have a little bit more than 10% more "you" time, which is massive.

Alex

This 1ms advantage is worth 100m USD, isn't relevant to transatlantic bandwidth.

The quote from wikipedia https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Low_latency_(capital_markets) is

"A 1-millisecond advantage in trading applications can be worth $100 million a year to a major brokerage firm, by one estimate."

I can't find the original source of this - but IIRC its from the CTO of someone like Goldman's or BoA.

If you are doing high frequency trading on a NY or London based exchange, you don't buy the lowest latency connectivity from the exchange to you. You put your systems as close to the exchange as possible AND THEN you buy the lowest latency connectivity from the exchange to you. Your systems which trade in NY are based in NY, and your systems which trade in London are based in London.

I'm sure there is some minor advantage of NY and London being slightly closer together from a latency perspective, but I'm sure its not as much as 100M USD.

Alex

didn't know they were ipod speakers, nice pizza and cappu though.