HP outdoes MythBusters with a spectacular disaster recovery test explosion

Tony Austin
Friday, 31 October 2008 13:39

Opinion and Analysis

I'm sure that iTWire readers are familiar with the cult TV series MythBusters (screened in Australia on the SBS free-to-air television channel). If not, here's a screed about them at Wikipedia and a list of their YouTube video snippets.

No, it's not Mythbusters.com, which is another website not affiliated with the TV show, but worth a look all the same.

The MythBusters show is much fun to watch, yet as well as amusement it offers lots of serious matter (such as Adam & Jamie draw a Mona Lisa in 80 milliseconds! when they compared the processing approach of a CPU versus a GPU to explain parallel processing on NVIDIA Corporation's NVISION Show.

They're particularly keen on explosions of all types and sizes, one of their most eye-catching efforts being the instantaneous fragmentation -- "vaporization" was the term used by one of the onlookers -- of a cement truck, watch it here (or here).

I would rate the HP datacenter demolition ranks right up there with the best from MythBusters! It has great entertainment value and certainly proves their point, that their Large Enterprise Business team have the ability to engineer what they call disaster-proof solutions.

Now there's confidence for you! I would have used the term "disaster resistant" (just like some watches and cameras are classified as water resistant rather than waterproof). Elsewhere they talk about "Disaster Tolerant" Solutions which to me smacks of a slightly lower degree of confidence, but I won't quibble.

The hardware/software products used for this test included HP Integrity servers, HP StorageWorks disk products, HP Software, HP Procurve networking and HP ProLiant Servers. They were running five operating environments: HP-UX (their variant of UNIX), HP OpenVMS, HP NonStop, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft® Windows Server 2003.

"It literally entailed" HP said, "blowing up a cluster of systems (virtually the entire spectrum of HP products, including the substantially lower priced, standards-based systems and storage arrays), which were all running real applications used by simulated users to prove fail-over would not cause business disruption."

PLEASE READ ON...