back to article 3Par brought down Australian Tax Office with >REDACTED<

Hewlett Packard Enterprise “failed to deliver on the contractual terms” it agreed with Australia's Taxation Office after 3Par storage arrays twice failed at the Office, according to commissioner of taxation Chris Jordan. But the cause of the problems may never be publicly revealed. Speaking before a Senate Estimates* hearing …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Or just tell the Amazon Billionaire Jeff Bezos to pay tax

    Or any of the othe billion dollar companies who pay the same tax as a toilet attendant.

    Pay you fair share you tax-evading megacorps!

    1. Simon Sharwood, Reg APAC Editor (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: Or just tell the Amazon Billionaire Jeff Bezos to pay tax

      Amazon only has AWS and a Kindle store in Australia. Physical goods coming later this year.

  2. Adam 1

    > some are likely to go to litigation.

    Not buying it. There is no way they'll pay up without lawyers at 12 paces.

    <Tinfoil hat mode>

    I could believe that HPE were offered a very good settlement in exchange for falling on their sword. The government really doesn't want any more IT failures on its watch.

    </Tinfoil hat mode>

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Don't hide behind it

    There have been a few reported outages that appear to involve HP 3par kit like this and the KCL one. The assumption is that the kit may be unreliable.

    1) If it isn't a fault with the kit or it is being used incorrectly, let us know what the problem is so we can avoid the same mistakes.

    2) If it is a fault with the kit, let us know so that we can ensure that configuration isn't used until it is fixed and let us know that it has been fixed so that it won't happen again.

    Just keeping quiet so that we don't know the cause or whether it has been fixed just makes sure that HPE 3par kit cannot be recommended as it is too risky.

    1. Amos1

      Re: Don't hide behind it

      A former website vendor experienced a meltdown of a storage system. It occurred three or four years ago and resulted in some instantly-recognizable brand name websites being down for a long time. According to the vendor there was still data in the memory cache so they could not reboot the system as Support recommended; they had to wait until an engineer examined the RAM and the disk to assure they were not going to lose any transactions. It was traced back to a firmware defect. At least that is what the vendor told us. I'll have to look it up and see if we still have the docs since we no longer use them because they went out of the web hosting business (for other reasons). Yes, I thought it was the same model but am not certain.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Don't hide behind it

      A few? Or 2?

  4. Gerhard Mack

    Seriously?

    How could this possibly be a cabling issue? I don't recall the last time I've seen a SAN without redundant cables for everything.. power, SAS network and FCAL all have redundant cables and they are all supposed to hot fail-over in the case that one of them is damaged.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Seriously?

      Sometimes things that may still work with a fully dead network cable will fall over badly when you damage a cable but don't break it.

      I've seen a whole network get taken down by some layer 1 issues due to a damaged fibre between two switches (and this was just a redundancy cable and not STP active at the time).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Seriously?

        erm, UDLD anyone?

    2. Calleb III

      Re: Seriously?

      If the damaged cable was the passive in an active/passive setup and a failover was triggered for whatever reason (like primary/active controller node failing or being rebooted for firmware upgrade or simply failing etc.)

      It's a loooong shot and would expose poor redundancy in the first place but not impossible.

      My $$ is on firmware bug(s) though - same thing that brought down KCL's 3PAR

      1. Gerhard Mack

        Re: Seriously?

        I would be *really* pissed if the SAN didn't alert me to a failed redundant path.

      2. Sandgroper

        Re: Seriously?

        Maybe if the system was designed in the early 80's. When we talk active/passive in networking, we refer to the interface being actively forwarding or not. At the most basic level, passive interfaces still monitor the physical link. In the more typical scenario, the end systems still exchange keep-alive messages over passive interfaces to ensure the elements can actually reach each other.

  5. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    WTF?

    "Commercial confidentiality"

    The all purpose excuse.

    Bottom line HPE kit can't be trusted.

    Are they that good that nothing comes close?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Commercial confidentiality"

      Hmm, I suspect an axe to grind! Show me a vendor that hasn't had 2 customer outages, especially 2 where it's keyboard warriors pointing the finger at the vendor, not the customer.

  6. Phil Kingston

    So we can't be told how IBM broke the census and we can't be told how HPE* broke the ATO?

    And we wonder why there's no confidence in gummint IT...

    *Assuming it was them and not someone's slovenly shelf shifting stuffup

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