Storage controlled by HP smartpqi driver goes offline intermittently with "Medium access timeout failure"

Issue

The disk storage accessed by the smartpqi driver occasionally goes offline with messages found in syslog similar to the ones below:

[Thu Mar  4 11:09:57 2021] smartpqi 0000:12:00.0: resetting scsi 1:1:0:0
[Thu Mar  4 11:09:57 2021] smartpqi 0000:12:00.0: reset of scsi 1:1:0:0: SUCCESS
[Thu Mar  4 11:11:38 2021] smartpqi 0000:12:00.0: resetting scsi 1:1:0:0
[Thu Mar  4 11:11:38 2021] smartpqi 0000:12:00.0: reset of scsi 1:1:0:0: SUCCESS
[Thu Mar  4 11:15:42 2021]  nvme0n1:
[Thu Mar  4 11:20:09 2021] smartpqi 0000:12:00.0: resetting scsi 1:1:0:0
[Thu Mar  4 11:20:47 2021]  nvme0n1:
[Thu Mar  4 11:21:10 2021] smartpqi 0000:12:00.0: reset of scsi 1:1:0:0: SUCCESS
[Thu Mar  4 11:21:10 2021] sd 1:1:0:0: [sda] Medium access timeout failure. Offlining disk!
[Thu Mar  4 11:21:10 2021] sd 1:1:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
[Thu Mar  4 11:21:10 2021] sd 1:1:0:0: [sda] FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_TIMEOUT
[Thu Mar  4 11:21:10 2021] sd 1:1:0:0: [sda] CDB: Write(16) 8a 00 00 00 00 75 ff fe 8b a8 00 00 00 20 00 00
[Thu Mar  4 11:21:10 2021] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 506806045608
[Thu Mar  4 11:21:10 2021] sd 1:1:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device