A tale of two lives: Under test and in the wild

Abstract

The reliability and availability of today's large-scale systems hinges on the reliability of the often millions of hardware components they comprise. Before deployment, devices undergo rigorous testing as part of the design and manufacturing process to assure they meet reliability expectations. In this talk we will look at the other half of the story: the post-deployment life of devices, once they enter production use in the field. Based on field data from large-scale production systems, we will study different aspects of hardware reliability in the wild, with a focus on DRAM DIMMs, and show that life in in the real world can be quite different from that in the lab.