In a vivid demonstration of how critical business systems can be protected in a real-world disaster, Hewlett Packard recently staged the ultimate business continuity test – simulating a catastrophe by blowing up more than $1 million in equipment and showing how HP systems fail over flawlessly.
A new video simulates a natural gas explosion – using about 70 pounds of C4 explosives to destroy HP Integrity, Integrity NonStop and ProLiant systems connected by ProCurve Networking switches and HP B-Series SAN Directors. They were running five operating environments -- all attached to HP StorageWorks XP disk arrays. The architecture was designed and set up by HP Services, and the storage network topology was reported by Storage Essentials Software.
In the “Disaster Proof” video, the HP systems fail over perfectly, resuming services after 13 to 113 seconds. HP disaster tolerant solutions work – and here’s the proof. For the video and complete information library, go to www.hp.com/go/DisasterProof.
The story began a year ago, when HP engineers fired a high-velocity bullet through an XP12000 storage array to test its reliability. The XP never skipped a beat and was declared “Bulletproof.” The video of that test was viewed hundreds of thousands of times. (See that video at: www.hp.com/go/storageworks/bulletproofxp.)
This year, HP engineers wanted to test business continuity and availability solutions by failing over a complete data center – highlighting HP’s disaster tolerant solutions by showing its full range of servers, storage, software, networking and services. HP did that by simulating a disaster, in this case an explosion caused by a ruptured gas line in an organization’s primary data center.
The physical demonstration was staged in mid-May 2007 at the National Technical Systems (NTS) Ballistic Test Center in Camden, Arkansas. NTS specializes in ordnance, munitions and environmental testing. It is equipped to conduct a wide array of testing – including commercial products.
During professional filming of the “Disaster Proof” video, explosive charges were placed inside each rack to maximize damage. All charges were tied together with detonating cord. A single Exploding Bridge wire detonator was used to start the explosive train.
Despite the loss of the data center, HP showed how a customer’s business could continue with HP’s disaster tolerant software offerings running on HP Integrity, HP ProLiant and HP Integrity NonStop systems connected by ProCurve switches and StorageWorks SAN Directors. Applications continued to run and be accessible. Transactions in process were protected and captured, showing how business risk can be mitigated while significantly reducing the effects of a site outage.
In the test, all five operating system environments – HP-UX, HP OpenVMS, HP NonStop, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 – continued to be available. In addition, HP StorageWorks Cluster Extension software automated the failover for the Windows and Linux environments, and Serviceguard for Linux provided high availability.
The goal of the demonstration was to raise awareness that HP is your “one-stop shop” for Disaster Proof solutions. For more information on stress-free business continuity and availability solutions for the most demanding customer needs, go to www.hp.com/go/DisasterProof or www.hp.com/go/continuityandavailability.
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