Finisar: Test Tools Suite

Medusa Labs Test Tools Suite

With over 10 years' experience in Fibre Channel SAN testing and validation, Finisar's Medusa labs brings its years of hands-on expertise and knowledge in the test and validation arena and puts it directly into this test suite. Finisar's Medusa Labs Test Tool Suite is a series of benchmark speed, data integrity and stress test tools that allow test and validation engineers to better develop quality products in a shorter time frame, for faster time to market. The suite was designed specifically for engineers that work with DVT, validation, bring-up, design validation and Quality Assurance.

Medusa Labs realized early on that there were no industry software test tools that met its stringent testing requirements. Currently, most of the industry is using shareware benchmarks or ineffective I/O generating tools that are not capable of identifying the vast majority of bugs on most products. Finisar's Medusa Labs Test Tool Suite was specifically designed to find elusive data corruptions, I/O timeouts, I/O loss, and system lockup scenarios. The tools are very rich in debug and logging information to allow for rapid analysis of any found issues. They are designed to stress hardware and signal integrity and are also portable to all of the major operating systems so that familiarity on one platform leads to familiarity on all others.

Product Features

Bit for Bit Data Integrity Checking at Benchmark speeds
Provides Wealth of Data Patterns Designed to Find Weaknesses in Hardware (Signal Integrity)
Ability to Automatically Trigger a Protocol Analyzer for Root Cause Analysis when Anomalies are Discovered
Complete I/O Control (Queue Depth, I/O size, File Size, I/O Direction)

How the Test Tools Work

Medusa Labs test tools are user-mode command-line applications that run on a host system. At the simplest level, our test tools operate in an initiator-target fashion. The host system acts as an initiator and the target can be any storage device internal or external to the host system. With our test tools, the host system becomes a precision traffic generator using real-world application data. Because the tools are command-line based, they are ideal for setting up scripted test runs.

I/O Tools

Pain and Maim are the currently available I/O test tools in the Test Tools Suite. Pain is a synchronous I/O tool that is designed to issue a single pending I/O per worker thread. Maim is an asynchronous I/O tool that uses a single worker thread to issue multiple I/Os at once.

The Use of Finisar Protocol Analyzers

While Medusa Labs Test Tools are designed to report conditions as accurately as possible from the application level, we cannot overemphasize the importance of using in-line protocol analyzers such or traffic monitors whenever possible. In our experience, a substantial number of defects or deficiencies are overlooked in product development due to anomalies that are not readily visible at the application level. An analyzer is essential to detecting underlying items of interest.

Read how Microsoft IT recovers damaged exchange databases with the help of Medusa Labs Test Tools.

Data Sheet: Medusa Labs Test Tools Suite 2.0