Engineers Interview: Index | Design and Development | Quality Assurance | Manufacturing |
Stage 2. Quality Assurance
"Our storage systems are used to store and manage our customers' most important data assets. We in the Quality Assurance Department therefore, thoroughly verify the products so that data loss never happens. There are two areas on which we placed a high quality premium. One is non-stop operation of the storage system, and the other is the total protection of the stored data."
Repetitive Clip Testing
"One of the methods we use to ensure quality is the repetitive clip test. This test repeatedly generates controller errors by sending irregularly noise signals to the printed-circuit boards in an operating ETERNUS storage system. This verifies that the system recovers from such errors as its design intended."
BBC Clip Testing
"Another method of quality assurance is the BBC clip test. Each high-density printed-circuit board in an ETERNUS storage system is populated with thousands of parts. The impact of failure of each of these parts is verified using the BBC Clip Testing Robot developed by Fujitsu. This testing device can generate failure conditions using timings and probabilities impossible to duplicate manually. The result is sure verification of the recovery capability of the system."
Simulated Disk Testing
"A third testing method used is the Simulated Disk test. This simulates disk errors, and ensures the failed disk is isolated, while verifying if the data protection functions have worked properly. Whatever kind of failures occur on the disks, the storage system must detect them, protect the all important data, and fully recover from the failure."
"In the verification stage, failures not predicted at the design stage can sometimes occur. In such cases, we thoroughly investigate the cause and fully solve the problem in cooperation with the design department. Importantly we actually recreate every possible failure, and verify that the system fully recovers and normally operation continues."
