In our Services department we see all sorts of systems, network switches, routers, and medical devices, etc. They all share a common theme….the DDR Memory does not work right. The engineers sending us these problem systems are frustrated and we often hear ‘we started getting failures in the field after having it work for years’ or ‘the applications now can’t tolerate any failures’. We even get the occasional ‘this memory stick fails but this one does not, can you tell us why?’.
As we go through our Memory Channel Audit we often ask the customers ‘Where is the Validation report for this system?’ The customers almost always say ‘we have no idea!’.
Call me old fashioned but I recall working for a large enterprise vendor (DEC) where you had to thoroughly test and validate a system and produce a report that proved, at the very least, you tested it and looked at the Signal Integrity.
Given that our society is addicted to the internet, high speed communications, phones, laptops, air travel and on line everything, you would think that validating the platforms and systems that run all of these applications and make all of these critical calculations would at least have some kind of Validation Report.
But they don’t and their customers are buying literally millions of them and the general public has become overly reliant on them. The engineers who deploy these systems and are responsible for them in the field should not buy them unless the suppliers PROVE they are good.
Given that we are so addicted to the online world we have created we should pressure suppliers to prove that systems building the backbone of the internet are reliable and have been validated.
Got a good DDR Memory ‘failure’ you want to talk about? Contact me!