difficulties with its central office switch, it discovered that the problem was actually caused by the application’s storage – a mechanical hard drive which was being used to store the operating system as well as event data logging for the application. The problem stemmed from the fact that the company’s application required a 24/7 always-on duty cycle which extended the hard drive beyond its endurance limits, ultimately resulting in product failures into the double digits.
The company estimated that each product failure was costing $5,000 in service expenses alone – not including parts or required travel on the part of the technician, nor customer ill-will, which was forcing the company to discount its pricing to maintain business. In the interest of keeping customers satisfied and cutting costs associated with product failure, the company began a search for a better storage solution to meet its application’s needs.
Solution: Advanced solid-state storage technology for higher performance, reliability and product longevity
As a result of the company’s storage solution failures, alternative storage solutions were considered, among them advanced solid-state storage because of its high performance, high reliability and overall endurance which favored heavy duty-cycle and multi-year product lifecycle deployments.
The application’s storage requirement was for only 8 gigabytes (GB), a stark contrast to the 40GB hard drive that was originally being used (which was the lowest capacity offered by that storage supplier). After careful review, the company selected an 8GB SiliconDrive from SiliconSystems to replace the legacy hard drive solution. The new SiliconDrive provided the required amount of storage capacity for the application and immediately solved the endurance-related field failures. SiliconDrive is advanced solid-state storage technology with no moving parts. SiliconDrive features patented and patent-pending storage management algorithms that include wear-leveling over the entire drive and industry-leading 6-bit Error Correction Code (ECC).
The company further benefited from SiliconSystems’ patented PowerArmor and SiSMART technologies. Incorporated into every SiliconDrive, these two technologies work together to virtually eliminate drive corruption from power anomalies and to accurately forecast drive useable life to prevent unscheduled downtime.
Benefit: A highly reliable storage system, satisfied customers and money saved
By incorporating SiliconDrive into its central office switch application, the telecommunications OEM is now able to provide a highly reliable system that gives its customers the 24/7 always-on operation they require. The added benefit is that the OEM finally can be assured of a true multi-year product lifecycle that eliminates field failures and costly product requalifications. Customers are very satisfied with the higher performance and reliability, as well as with the lower total cost of ownership compared to the previous hard drive-based application. Ensuring customer goodwill means that the company’s reputation is restored.
