Why Conduant? : Key Differentiators

Summary

Conduant's real-time disk recording technology, StreamStor®, offers a number of benefits over traditional tape recorders including:

• Advanced, adaptable technology: StreamStor® features an onboard real-time OS and deep memory buffer. For standalone or embedded applications StreamStor® can be tailored easily to deal with application specific requirements including formatting, filtering and sampling.
• Hardware-to-hardware performance: Available for PCI, CompactPCI and PXI buses, StreamStor® provides a hardware-to-hardware recording and playback technology for real-time data acquisition. By isolating the data capture/playback on the PCI bus, the CPU and other system resources are available for other productive purposes during long-duration data acquisition. Hardware to hardware means you get maximum performance from your acquisition investment.
• Flexible interfaces: With StreamStor®, data can be collected or output via a wide variety of COTS hardware. You choose the interfaces and options that are most critical for your applications.
• Flexible media: StreamStor® supports solid state (SSD), Compact Flash, 2.5- and 3.5-inch IDE drives and serial ATA to meet a variety of packaging and environmental requirements. 3.5-inch IDE drives provide today’s most cost-effective media for real-time applications.
• Playback while recording: StreamStor® controls the storage media at the lowest levels possible. Without the overhead of an OS and file system, StreamStor® delivers a deterministic performance. With a full 0.5 GB of onboard RAM, StreamStor® is the only recorder that can deliver both real-time and asynchronous playback while recording. Save time and money by processing your data while the acquisition is in progress.
• Wrap recording: In wrap mode StreamStor® will record continuously with overwrite. This feature is useful for applications that have a trigger that requires data analysis. Since the recording is to large capacity disks you spend less time designing complex triggers; with StreamStor® you have hours of data for problem analysis.
• Longest duration: The Big River TK200 with Pendulum mode supports infinite data recording at 1 Gb/s. With IDE drives capacities continue to increase allowing for the longest recording durations in the industry at sustained data rates.
• Multi-channel recording: StreamStor® can be configured to record multiple input boards across the PCI bus with an aggregate bandwidth up to 200 MB/s.
• Partitioning: Partition the available disk space into multiple recording spaces.
• Disk vs. tape: Disk drives offer performance, access, capacity, integrity and cost advantages over instrumentation-grade tape solutions. Disk media is less expensive than equivalent tape media for real-time applications. Disk offers higher performance, random access to the recorded data, reduced maintenance and a lower bit-error rate. For extreme environments, Conduant also supports both solid state and 2.5-inch mobile drives to give you the widest range of media options available.
• IDE vs. SCSI: StreamStor® is designed to maximize the data throughput of each disk used for recording. By recording the drives sequentially, avoiding missed revolutions, eliminating fragmentation, and dynamically allocating “available” drives while recording, StreamStor® excels at sequential data acquisition. SCSI drives, while faster at seeking for general purpose applications, offer little benefit for real-time, sequential recording and playback. IDE drives, by contrast, generate less heat, spin slower, cost less, and have the highest disk capacity available. This translates to your best value in the marketplace for recording media.
• StreamStor® vs. RAID: StreamStor® is a special purpose recording solution designed specifically to eliminate bottlenecks common to general purpose storage solutions. RAID, optical devices and tape solutions require intervention by the operating system, CPU and system memory to direct the storage of files on the media. This architecture requires the data to transfer from the acquisition source, through the host system to the storage media. For real-time applications this architecture cannot guarantee high sustained data rates due to the hardware and software overhead of the data path. With StreamStor® data transfers direct to disk with zero intervention by the OS, CPU or system memory. By accepting data directly via Conduant's FPDP, Channel Link or PCI interface your high-speed data is captured 100 percent of the time with no buffer overruns. Talk to us today to help architect your next real-time data acquisition solution.