Building Reliability into HP Workstations
Technical white paper | Building reliability into HP Workstations
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System reliability is essential for workstation users. At HP, we recognize that professionals can’t settle for anything
less than the highest levels of reliability. System crashes, component breakdowns, and sluggish performance can bring
work to a halt and result in several hours or days of lost productivity. That’s why we design our workstations to meet the
challenges of the most demanding workloads and duty cycles— an HP focus for the past 30 years. Three decades of
workstation engineering innovation has created a level of reliability that is widely recognized in the industry.
Here are some of the things we do to make the HP Workstation name synonymous with rock-solid reliability.
A strenuous design standard
We design our systems based on workstation application demands, a rigorous customer use model and a design
standard that goes beyond just the warranty period. Our design model is based on “Class 2” electronics
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—a level reserved
for highly reliable systems with demanding workloads. Class 2 electronics assumes a use model well beyond the normal
limited work cycle of a typical home computer or consumer electronic device, which are usually specied as Class 3.
HP Workstations are designed and built for mission-critical workloads and always-on environments. As such, they
employ many of the same types of components used in servers. These components include Intel® Xeon® processors,
error correcting code (ECC) memory, and enterprise-class storage technologies, such as 15K Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS)
and solid-state drives (SSDs).
We oer power supplies with high standards for hold-up time, capacitor life, and operating temperature. Long hold-up can
help sustain reliable power delivery in spite of poor AC power conditions. Capacitors are chosen to provide long lifetimes
at elevated temperatures. Every new aluminum electrolytic “can” capacitor must pass a rigorous set of reliability tests
before it can be considered in our designs. We work closely with processor suppliers such as Intel to ensure our power
delivery and cooling solutions meet or exceed all of the suppliers’ specications for both steady state and transient
workloads. We design for high operating temperatures to meet the demanding workloads of workstation customers.
Even the smallest and most common electronic components, like resistors and capacitors, are carefully chosen based
on quality, reliability, and top performance. A dedicated team in the HP Workstation Research and Development
organization performs a thorough assessment of every critical component and tracks even the smallest manufacturing
changes to these components during the lifetime of the product.
Brutal three-axis testing
In choosing workstation components, we don’t stop at the specications in the manufacturer’s data sheet. In our
workstations test lab in Fort Collins, Colorado, we subject components to rigorous testing to verify their performance
under extreme conditions. In brutal three-axis testing—where frequency, voltage, and temperature are varied—our
engineers push the limits of processors, memory, and other system parts.
This testing goes far beyond the boundaries of typical use models. Inspired by a long history of workstation technologies
development, including HP-designed processors and chipset or graphics chips, this three-axis testing uses proprietary
tools and techniques, and stresses components in ways that help detect potential design or component weaknesses that
would otherwise go unnoticed. Various memory DIMM modules, for example, often fail our three-axis testing, and are
disqualied by HP despite being used by other workstation manufacturers. Memory suppliers, in turn, often look to HP to
identify design and silicon issues in their products.
Ultimately, this aggressive testing program yields extremely reliable end-products. It allows us to design and ship
workstations with robust functional margins and components that can easily handle the conditions and workloads of
professional environments from car test tracks to oil elds, from manufacturing oors to construction trailers and other
rugged environments.