Technologies
In 2006, Third I/O released Iris; a high speed Fibre Channel solid state disk that used servers as the platform and computer memory as a storage media. From 2006 to 2014, Iris was regularly benchmarked as the fastest external storage device available as it allowed for extremely high bandwidth and I/O operations per second. Unfortunately, Iris may have been a little too fast for the industry as running it often found critical bugs on enterprise servers. It found so many problems, in fact, that we started to brainstorm on how to create a diagnostic to see if a system’s CPU, memory, and chipset could handle extreme DMA (direct memory accesses) as was required by Iris.
This brainstorming led us to innovate and create Memesis; a Linux kernel embedded enterprise memory test. We designed Memesis to push extreme levels of stress and bandwidth between the processors and memory while looking for data corruptions and ECC events. It was our goal to create a test that could perform operations similar to high performance DMA without using specialized peripherals. Since 2009, Memesis has been responsible for finding hundreds of hardware anomalies at the CPU, memory, chipset, power, and cooling subsystems of computer systems.
We have most recently created a user space version of Memesis that has been designed to test all memory technologies, including several still in the prototype stage of development. Currently named Memesis-FT, it has been designed to stress test and analyze DRAM as well as many new non-volatile technologies such as flash, SSD, NVMe, as well as non-volatile memories over fabric interconnects.
