Success story – Tuxera helps industrial automation company prove its reputation for high-reliability products

Tuxera Reliance™, Reliance Nitro™, and FlashFX Tera™ proven to provide rock-solid power fail-safety in factory automation applications.

A reputation that counts on delivering fail safety

The world’s largest industrial automation and information company* is committed to making its customers more productive and efficient. This company is known in the industrial community around the world for delivering the most reliable automation products in the market. Industrial automation is truly a high-stakes business. Any failure could cost their customers millions of dollars per day in lost revenue and do damage to the company’s hard-earned reputation for quality earned over decades of service to its customers. This reputation is a driving force behind their commitment to product reliability.

* Company name cannot be disclosed due to NDA restrictions.

Equipment featured here may not be actual product discussed.

The challenge

When the product engineering group discovered data corruption issues related to file system corruption in its factory automation products, the team knew it had to work quickly to find a solution. They were using T-FAT, the default file system included in Windows Embedded CE, which is based on the FAT file system originally designed for desktop computing. For many applications T-FAT works fine, but when reliability is important due to criticality of data or a requirement for always-on operation, T-FAT may not always be the best choice. In their quest for a more reliable alternative, the team discovered Tuxera Reliance™ (formerly know as Datalight Reliance™), a true transactional file system that never overwrites live data. The Dynamic Transaction Point™ technology found in Reliance provides total immunity from the file corruption caused by power loss or other uncontrolled system shutdowns. When paired with the sophisticated control of our intelligent flash management software, Tuxera FlashFx Tera, Tuxera’s software brings unparalleled longevity and reliability to cost-saving raw flash storage.

After hearing about Tuxera’s software, the company engineers decided to evaluate it in their labs using a rigorous series of controlled tests. While testing was ongoing, we visited to make sure the engineering team had what they needed. We were impressed by the scope of their testing, involving several large racks of factory automation systems all running our software with random power cycling at frequent intervals, mimicking real-world scenarios where uncontrolled system shutdown is a constant concern.

The results

After running the Tuxera-enabled units through millions of power cycles without a single failure, the engineering team determined that they had found their solution. Tuxera’s software was more than capable of delivering the level of reliability that industrial customers need and expect. Their diligence in testing the reliability of each component in their industrial automation and information systems has given the company an advantage with customers for whom any failure can have devastating consequences. As a result of this focus on quality at every level of the system, the world’s largest industrial automation company continues to be the standard bearer for quality and reliability in the industry. Since their initial selection of Tuxera’s storage management software, this customer has expanded their use of Tuxera’s products across multiple product lines and multiple operating systems.

They adopted Tuxera Reliance, Reliance Nitro, and FlashFX Tera in various combinations on Linux and Windows Embedded Compact.

* This customer success story has been updated July 8, 2020. Datalight was originally mentioned as the software provider in this story. As of 2019, Datalight Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of Tuxera Inc. Tuxera now owns all of Datalight’s former products, including the ones mentioned in this project. Tuxera is dedicated to providing superior technical know-how in data storage challenges and responsive customer support.

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Tuxera

Tuxera is the leading provider of quality-assured data storage management software and networking technologies. We help people and businesses store and move data reliably, while making file transfers fast and content easily accessible. Our software is at the core of billions of phones, tablets, cars, TV sets, cameras, drones, external storage, routers, spacecraft, IoT devices, and public cloud storage platforms.

Tuxera’s customers include car makers, device manufacturers, industrial equipment manufacturers, data-driven enterprises, and many more. We help them solve complex challenges involving data in all its states – at rest, in use, and in motion. They rely on our software to protect data integrity, ensure data accessibility, improve storage performance, transfer data rapidly and securely, and extend flash memory lifetime in their products and for their projects.