The tool is certainly useful, but have you also thought about having Dell (or 
HP) integration service doing the burn-in for you before delivery? We have our 
integrator run a lot of tests before shipping us a rack of machines using off 
the shelf tools that stress memory and CPU in particular. Memtest is one such 
that is semi-obvious, but also Linpack immediately comes to mind as a general 
purpose CPU and memory stresser. You can also use the results of the test to 
validate conformance to baseline. It is possible for memory to seem otherwise 
fine but perform 20% slower without any ECC errors. We've seen occassional 
weird cases like that. Of course, this all works better when you are getting 
some number of machines at a time vs a singleton. For singletons, the 
integration and testing overhead is very high because they have to unbox and 
rebox.

This is a decent general purpose test suite. You could do something like specify
"Integrator shall run 24 hours of  http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpc/ achieving CPU 
throughput no less than <x> and memory bandwidth no less than <y>"

Tests like that are good for catching early failures. Linpack really heats up a 
system.



Sent from my android device.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Julian <[email protected]>
To: LOPSA Discuss <[email protected]>
Sent: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 9:13 AM
Subject: [lopsa-discuss] Hardware burn-in tools

Hey all,

We're investigating options for doing hardware burn-ins on servers before
we hand them off to customers, thanks to a long history of hardware
failures within 24-72 hours of handing them over.

We're an all-Dell shop, though we are also looking at moving to HP sometime
soon-ish (leaving us with supporting both Dell and HP).

Ideally, we'd love something that can easily be automated and is
Linux-based.

What tool recommendations do you have?

-Mike
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