In a bizarre stunt, HP has released a video of an experiment where they fired a .308 calibre bullet into one of their Storageworks servers to show that they are truly “bulletproof”. As if potentially destroying a half a million dollar’s worth of electronics weren’t enough; they somewhat outrageously set up a fish tank behind the server.

In their 3 minute absolutely “must see” video the technicians from HP prepare to shoot the bullet into a $0.5 million storage array from a distance of 40 feet – fortunately the hapless goldfish was removed for the test.

As the bullet crashes through the server and explodes into the fish tank located behind it; a videostream continues uninterrupted on an array of monitors. The XP12000 disk array is then restored to its fully-functional state with no loss of uptime.

OK so some of you are saying that HP have come up with a solution to a problem that no one has in practice, but there was a serious side to this test. There are situations for which downtime is absolutely not an option, and such arrays have to be “bullet-proof” (in an IT reliability sense), with massive built-in redundancy; hence their enormous cost.

The demonstration lasts about 2 minutes, but of course HP has to spend the next minute with an extremely detailed disclaimer, pointing out that you are not covered under the terms of your guarantee if you make a similar test at home nor, are HP liable if you harm yourself whilst trying to repeat the test etc. It’s quite funny.

It’s a cool video anyway, well worth a look.

Al and myself are thinking about performing a similar stunt, but of course we don’t have such a large budget, so we’re going to fire an airgun pellet into an old HP Inkjet… can anyone lend us a video camera ?

Found via engadget.