Hi there Brightminds, I share your pain !
We recently purchased 17 DL380 G7's for a variety of uses; a couple of 4-node Hyper-V clusters, a couple of 3-node Xen Server clusters and a 3-node SQL cluster.
We have intermittently been having server hangs/reboots with some, but not all of these servers, which sound very similar to the issue you are reporting.
Initially we were getting fairly frequent Stop 0xF4's with some of the servers running Windows Server 2008 R2, with no crash dump file but always an Integrated Management Log entry on the next powerup saying "POST Error: 1719 - A controller failure event occurred prior to this power-up". This suggests to me that the array controller was hanging, and as you say, sometimes struggling to even get the server to reboot again, with the server getting stuck on the BIOS Option ROM screen initialising the array controller.
We then upgraded the P410I Array Controller BIOS on the server to v3.52, which we thought had fixed the issue. (This update isn't listed on the DL380 G7 Support and Drivers page for some reason, you need to goto the P410i support and drivers page), but we now have had the issue re-occur, but gut feeling is that it happens less often now.
I'm just about to raise the issue with HP Support again, but its always a painful experience that I have no expectation of finding a solution (Run raid diagnostics, reseat the cache memory, reset the NVRAM etc. etc.)
I just hope that HP know about the issue and are already working on a fix !
Out of curiosity, hum much memory do you have in your servers ? for us the servers that suffer the most have more memory in them than the others, 60GB.
