
That seems rather specific. Is there some sort of self-destruct code in the firmware they forgot to remove?
HPE has told customers that four kinds of solid-state drives (SSDs) in its servers and storage systems may experience failure and data loss at 40,000 hours, or 4.5 years, of operation. The IT titan said in a bulletin this month the “issue is not unique to HPE and potentially affects all customers that purchased these drives.” …
For home users, if you are going to buy a NAS, then buy a pair of them and swap the disks to get non-sequential serial numbers to each NAS.
You can then get a safe network backup by making the second NAS invisible on the network and use rsync to pull an incremental copy of all the data from the visible NAS every night.
Buy a bare unit, and buy the disks from two sellers. Preferably multiple brands per order as well if the NAS doesn't object (it shouldn't). At the very least split the order between the NAS plus half the disks, and the other half a week or two later if you want to stick with one seller.
If you are using enterprise hardware then you get what you get. There is no option to specify the manufacturer of the actual disk in the carrier. In fact they are usually all the same. If you are really concerned then you do a rolling replacement at various points in the life of the system. Though hou you do that with 1000 disks in a storage solution is interesting.
As ever, what you do with a generic box, array control and a handful of disks is not the same at enterprise scale.
"I quickly discovered that you should not buy a bunch of disks from the same vendor, always use different batches "
Something that seems "lost" on vendors pushing arrays into enterprise. It's extremely difficult to convince 'em to supply anything other than a boxful of identical HDDs with sequential serial numbers to drop into the chassis. Bad enough when it's a small array, a potential nightmare scenario if you're up servers with 60+ drives in 'em. (Been there done that - looking at you HP)
It's a bug where a huge circular buffer is used, which needs to start back at the beginning of the buffer after 40,000 hours of operation, and the code checking for the condition is wrong by one. Since they are telling people now about this, which means they will update the firmware or be responsible for it, I'd assume this is entirely bad luck.
32768 a number I remember well. It was the location of the first character on a Commodore P.E.T display.
POKE 32768,65
would put an A there
It's actually 2^16 so the 16th address line on a 6502
65 being the ASCII code for A
It sounds like there must be some sort of clock inside these SSDs because why else would it be counting hours. Also perhaps it's supposed to die when that number runs out but it was either supposed to be a bigger number or a slower count.
Well, no, it isn't.
The inkjet cartridges are planned obsolescence, and they self-destruct on a programmed date, regardless of how much they've been used. The SSDs fail after doing a certain amount of (presumably useful) work, and if the comment above regarding a circular buffer is accurate, it's an actual mistake in the firmware (albeit one that should never have made it out the door).
Inkjet cartridges (and inkjet printers) are a scam. This is a stupid bug.
And, of course, HPE doesn't sell inkjet cartridges; that's HP Inc.
Dell sent me an email with the service tag of an affected server I look after. Nice email with the tag in a url to the page to download the drivers, and the name of what you needed.
So good on them. But then again they sell servers with 5 years warranty, so would not them all failing in 4 years 200 days. But then I want not want all the drives to fail at the same time either.
"The blunder seems to be that they give 5y warrant"
Few customers buy 5 year support. 3 years is standard from most vendors unless you push hard for more (and going to 5 years usually adds a 100% premium over 3 year support contracts)
Ergo most vendors aren't going to give a flying F* and warranty beyond that point is your problem
(worse - most drive makers sell OEM drives with _only_ the warranty provided by the vendor - so if you bought 3 year support on a system containing drives with a supposed 5 year warranty, then 3 year warranty is what you actually get)
....and if it isn't a clock, then what is it counting? And why would 40,000 turn out to be a magic number?
*
If it's a matter of maintenance data being needed ("How old is this drive?", etc), then what's wrong with writing a date and time stamp record somewhere at install time?
"HPE has told customers that four kinds of solid-state drives (SSDs) in its servers and storage systems may experience failure and data loss at 40,000 hours, or 4.5 years, of operation."
Looks like a freaking unusually high MTBF for any HPE gear, those days !
Last Superdomes I've seen installed were done with HPE staff connected to them 24X7 for a couple of weeks before they ran by themselves ...
Arm has a champion in the shape of HPE, which has added a server powered by the British chip designer's CPU cores to its ProLiant portfolio, aimed at cloud-native workloads for service providers and enterprise customers alike.
Announced at the IT titan's Discover 2022 conference in Las Vegas, the HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 server is the first in a series of such systems powered by Ampere's Altra and Altra Max processors, which feature up to 80 and 128 Arm-designed Neoverse cores, respectively.
The system is set to be available during Q3 2022, so sometime in the next three months, and is basically an enterprise-grade ProLiant server – but with an Arm processor at its core instead of the more usual Intel Xeon or AMD Epyc X86 chips.
Extending a public-cloud-like experience to on-prem datacenters has long been a promise of HPE's GreenLake anything-as-a-service (XaaS) platform. At HPE Discover this week, the company made good on that promise with the launch of GreenLake for Private Cloud.
The platform enables customers "to have a cloud in their premises wherever the data is, whether it's at the edge, it's at a colo datacenter, or is at any other location," Vishal Lall, SVP and GM for HPE GreenLake cloud services solutions, said during a press briefing ahead of Discovery.
Most private clouds up to this point have been custom-built environments strapped together with some automation, he said. "It was somewhat of an improvement over the DIY infrastructure, but it really wasn't private cloud."
Hewlett Packard Enterprise must pay Oracle $30 million for copyright infringement after a jury found it guilty of providing customers with Solaris software updates without Big Red's permission.
The decision, which HPE may contest, is the culmination of a three-week trial in Oakland, California. However, the case was first raised years back when Oracle claimed HPE had offered illegal updates under a scheme devised by software support provider Terix, which settled its case in 2015 for almost $58 million.
In proceedings at the start of this week, Oracle’s lawyer, Christopher Yeates of Latham & Watkins LLP, pressed the eight-person jury to award his client $72 million for HPE using software not covered by a support contract, and for pinching clients, including Comcast.
Analysis Lenovo fancies its TruScale anything-as-a-service (XaaS) platform as a more flexible competitor to HPE GreenLake or Dell Apex. Unlike its rivals, Lenovo doesn't believe it needs to mimic all aspects of the cloud to be successful.
While subscription services are nothing new for Lenovo, the company only recently consolidated its offerings into a unified XaaS service called TruScale.
On the surface TruScale ticks most of the XaaS boxes — cloud-like consumption model, subscription pricing — and it works just like you'd expect. Sign up for a certain amount of compute capacity and a short time later a rack full of pre-plumbed compute, storage, and network boxes are delivered to your place of choosing, whether that's a private datacenter, colo, or edge location.
HPE has scored another supercomputing win with the inauguration of the LUMI system at the IT Center for Science, Finland, which as of this month is ranked as Europe's most powerful supercomputer.
Why build a cloud datacenter yourself, when you can rent one from Hewlett Packard Enterprise? It may seem unorthodox, but That’s exactly the approach Singapore-based private cloud provider Taeknizon is using to extend its private cloud offering to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Founded in 2012, Taeknizon offers a menagerie of services ranging from IoT, robotics, and AI to colocation and private cloud services, primarily in the Middle East and Asia. The company’s latest expansion in the UAE will see it lean on HPE GreenLake’s anything-as-a-service (XaaS) platform to meet growing demand from small-to-midsize enterprises for cloud services in the region.
“Today, 94% of companies operating in the UAE are SMEs," Ahmad AlKhallafi, UAE managing director at HPE, said in a statement. "Taeknizon’s as-a-service model caters to the requirements of SMEs and aligns with our vision to empower youth and the local startup community.”
Predicting the weather is a notoriously tricky enterprise, but that’s never held back America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
After more than two years of development, the agency brought a pair of supercomputers online this week that it says are three times as powerful as the machines they replace, enabling more accurate forecast models.
Developed and maintained by General Dynamics Information Technology under an eight-year contract, the Cactus and Dogwood supers — named after the fauna native to the machines' homes in Phoenix, Arizona, and Manassas, Virginia, respectively — will support larger, higher-resolution models than previously possible.
Amid a delayed HPC contract and industry-wide supply limitations compounded by the lockdown in Shanghai, Hewlett Packard Enterprise reported year-on-year sales growth of $13 million for its Q2.
That equated to revenue expansion of 1.5 percent to $6.713 billion for the quarter ended 30 April. Wall Street had forecast HPE to generate $6.81 billion in sales for the period and didn't look too kindly on the shortfall.
"This quarter," said CEO and president Antonio Neri, "through a combination of supply constraints, limiting our ability to fulfill orders as well as some areas where we could have executed better, we did not fully translate the strong customer orders into higher revenue growth."
Western Digital has confirmed the board is considering "strategic alternatives" for the storage supplier, including spinning out its flash and hard disk businesses.
This follows calls last month by activist investor Elliott Management, which has amassed a $1 billion investment in WD equating to a six percent share stake, for a "full separation" based on those product lines.
In a statement, CEO David Goeckeler said: "The board is aligned in the belief that maximizing value creation warrants a comprehensive assessment of strategic alternatives focused on structural options for the company's Flash and HDD businesses.
AI is killing the planet. Wait, no – it's going to save it. According to Hewlett Packard Enterprise VP of AI and HPC Evan Sparks and professor of machine learning Ameet Talwalkar from Carnegie Mellon University, it's not entirely clear just what AI might do for – or to – our home planet.
Speaking at the SixFive Summit this week, the duo discussed one of the more controversial challenges facing AI/ML: the technology's impact on the climate.
"What we've seen over the last few years is that really computationally demanding machine learning technology has become increasingly prominent in the industry," Sparks said. "This has resulted in increasing concerns about the associated rise in energy usage and correlated – not always cleanly – concerns about carbon emissions and carbon footprint of these workloads."
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