Success story – Tuxera helps Alcatel-Lucent bring NAND-based ethernet solution to market rapidly and with enhanced reliability

Tuxera Reliance Nitro™ and FlashFX Tera™ bring fail-safety, improved responsiveness and performance to product for years to come.Assured data integrity and product longevityThe OmniSwitch 6250 (OS6250) is a family of 10/100 L2+ Ethernet workgroup switches that provide tremendous value to enterprise and to multiple service operators (MSOs). The family provides a complete solution with built-in optical and copper uplinks, fault-tolerant stacking and Power over Ethernet. The OS6250 is built on a hardware chipset running a mature software base including the VxWorks operating system. The hardware chosen by the Alcatel-Lucent engineering team dictated new NAND-flash chips that were not well supported by the software base. The team wrestled with the best way to use the new and cost-effective NAND parts without introducing bugs in the drivers or file system software and causing software support problems.Equipment featured here may not be actual product discussed.The challengeThe OmniSwitch 6250 (OS6250) is a family of 10/100 L2+ Ethernet workgroup switches that provide tremendous value to enterprise and to multiple service operators (MSOs). The family provides a complete solution with built-in optical and copper uplinks, fault-tolerant stacking and Power over Ethernet. The OS6250 is built on a hardware chipset running a mature software base including the VxWorks operating system. The hardware chosen by the Alcatel-Lucent engineering team dictated new NAND-flash chips that were not well supported by the software base. The team wrestled with the best way to use the new and cost-effective NAND parts without introducing bugs in the drivers or file system software and causing software support problems.The resultsAlcatel-Lucent considered in house development combining a NAND flash driver from the chip vendor with the flash file system from an older release of VxWorks, but decided it would take too long. Tuxera FlashFX Pro and Reliance were chosen to speed up development time, reduce risk, and avoid future support issues. Development went smoothly and on-schedule, and the Alcatel-Lucent team was able to concentrate their resources on the product instead of flash file system development, maintenance and support.

Customers using the OmniSwitch 6250 will notice smoother, more responsive performance, thanks to the professional flash management provided by FlashFX. The improved reliability of Reliance means fewer hassles and an Ethernet system that will work exactly as designed for years to come.

“Our customers will benefit from a robust flash file system that combines high performance and freedom from potential file system problems caused by power failures,” said Bryan Dietz, Alcatel-Lucent Senior Systems Architect.

* This customer success story has been updated in 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.Let us help you achieve your next success!

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