HP outdoes MythBusters with a spectacular disaster recovery test explosion

Tony Austin
Friday, 31 October 2008 13:39

Opinion and Analysis

Is it possible to have fun while you're working? It sure is, as HP proved by destroying a datacenter full of their enterprise server and storage products in an explosion simulating a gas leak that demonstrated complete fail-over of all the servers in less than two minutes.

Although this happened in mid-2007, I only just stumbled across it, enjoyed it immensely and reckon that it's a "classic" demo, so I simply had to share it with you.

In a test that could have been scripted for popular TV series MythBusters (more about that later), a team of Hewlett Packard engineers set up a real mini-datacenter test site at a high-tech ballistics center managed by National Technical Systems (NTS) in Camden, Arkansas.

HP's objective was to blow it up and prove that the servers, running a mix of operating systems, would all properly fail-over to a remote recovery site in a short time.

Just as in the TV series, they had done this sort of thing before and decided to increase the scale of destructiveness.

The previous test, also carried out for them by NTS, involved a .308-calibre rifle bullet (travelling at nearly 3,000 feet per second) passing through a refrigerator-sized HP StorageWorks XP12000 Disk Array cabinet to see if the array would continue operating.

Indeed they did, and you can read in Why was the HP XP12000 able to take the bullet and keep running? how the array's design and construction contributed to this.

You can also watch it happening. View the XP Bulletproof video and the XP Bulletproof documentary: A behind the scenes look. My only question about this demo is whether or not the bullet was rather carefully aimed to avoid any absolutely critical single-point-of-failure component of the array.

Before proceeding, lest you should accuse me of being a biased fan, let me disclose that I have no professional business relationship whatsoever with HP. (My only relationship with them is as a consumer, buying several of their multifunction printer/fax/scanner/copier machines.)

However I've long admired them for their excellence in design and engineering of high-tech equipment, from way back decades ago when I was a practising industrial chemist and chemistry teacher (even before I joined IBM, who also do lots of fine engineering). Wikipedia has this to say about them, and also places them (at the moment) at the top of this list of the largest technology companies in the world.

The "bulletproof" demonstration certainly is impressive, but I would up the term to spectacular for their follow-up act, the exploding datacenter. We're now talking about true MythBusters-style showmanship!

PLEASE READ ON...