Twice-crashed HPE SANs at Oz Tax Office built for speed, not strength, and turned off error reporting
Summary
Oz taxation commissioner Chris Jordan has revealed that the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has reached a commercial settlement with HPE over the two outages to its online services caused by 3PAR storage arrays. In remarks made to a Senate Committee today, Jordan said: "The turnkey service of data storage as per the 3PAR SAN provided by HPE failed us," and that the outages were attributable to three problems: Jordan added: "The SAN design and configuration meant we had an overemphasis on performance features rather than stability or resilience – a relatively small disk drive failure had a large impact – only 12 of some 800 disk drives failed, but they impacted most ATO systems." It appears that HPE has admitted fault to the tax office, as Jordan added: "We have reached a commercial settlement with HPE, the detailed terms of which are subject to contractual confidentiality. The tax offices SANs first went down in December 2016, causing several days of disruption to online services. The Register suggests readers do not stock up on popcorn ahead of next weeks release of documents investigating the failure, as Jordan has previously warned they are likely to be heavily redacted.