HPE Trips Over Australian Tax Office’s SAN
Summary
Theres been a bit of a kerfuffle in Australia over a series of storage outages of a 3PAR 20850 SAN solution Hewlett Packard Enterprise built for the Australian Tax Office, an organization that services over 12 million taxpayers. According to the report, this eventually "resulted in a systems outage, causing the majority of the ATO’s online services to become unavailable." By this time, enough conditions prespecified by ATO in its contract with HPE had been met to push categorizing the event as a Priority 1 incident. And although HPE went to work swapping out some cables and such in an attempt to remedy the situation, the tax agency was "not made fully aware of the significance of the continuing trend of alerts, nor the broader systems impacts that would result from the failure of the 3PAR SAN." For instance, there was another backup SAN running in a separate data center that due to a design issue couldnt be used for recovery, partly because ATO had "relied heavily on HPE recommendations," which in hindsight was a mistake.