At HPTechDay this week we had a tour of the EVA test lab, in the south building of HP’s Colorado Springs Facility. I was pretty impressed and I have seen more than my fair share of labs in my day.
Nowadays it seems to have increased by an order of magnitude. Of course they have sold something like 70,000 EVAs over the years and some of these 500 arrays happen to be older subsystems used to validate problems and debug issues for current field population.
They had some old Compaq equipment there but I seem to have flubbed the picture of that equipment. This one will have to suffice. It seems to have both vertically and horizontally oriented drive shelves. I couldn’t tell you which EVAs these were but as they were earlier in the tour, I figured they were older equipment. It seemed as you got farther into the tour you moved closer to the current iterations of EVA. It seemed like an archive dig in reverse instead of having the most current layers/levels first they were last.
I asked Tony how many FC ports he had and he said it was probably easiest to count the switch ports and double them but something in the thousands seemed reasonable.
There were parts of the lab which were both off limits to cameras and to bloggers which was deep into the bowels of the lab. But we were talking about some of the remote replication support that EVA had and how they tested this over distance. Tony said they had to ship their reel of 100 miles of FC up north (probably for some other testing) but he said they have a surragate machine which can be programmed to create the proper FC delay to meet any required distances.
The blue box in the adjacent picture seemed to be this magic FC delay inducer box. Had interesting lights on it.
Nigel Poulton of Ruptured Monkeys and Devang Panchigar of StorageNerve Blog were also on the tour taking pictures&video. You can barely make out Devang in the picture next to Nigel. Calvin Zito from HP StorageWorks Blog was also on tour but not in any of my pictures. 
Throughout our tour of the lab I can say I only saw one logic analyzer although I am sure there were plenty more in the off limits area. 
Nonetheless, I saw some hardware workstations although this was another lonely workstation sorrounded in a sea of EVAs. 
One picture of an EVA obviously undergoing some error injection test with drives tagged as removed and being rebuilt or reborn as part of RAID testing. 
I could go on and I have a couple of more decent lab pictures but you get the jist of the tour.
For some reason I enjoy lab tours. You can tell a lot about an organization by how their labs look, how they are manned, organized and set up. What HP’s EVA lab tells me is that they spare no expense to insure their product is literally bulletproof, bug proof, and works every time for their customer base. I must say I was pretty impressed.
At the end of HPTechDay event Greg Knieriemen of Storage Monkeys and Stephen Foskett of GestaltIT hosted an InfoSmack podcast to be broadcast next Sunday 10/4/2009. There we talked a little more on commodity hardware versus purpose built storage subsystem hardware, it was a brief, but interesting counterpoint to the discussions earlier in the week and the evidence from our portion of the lab tour.