Tuxera acquires mission-critical embedded flash storage leader Datalight
Offers the most comprehensive storage management software portfolio available to the market
SEATTLE, Washington, and ESPOO, Finland – June 5, 2019 – Tuxera, the world-leading storage software and networking technology company, has signed an agreement to acquire Datalight, the North American developer of embedded file systems, and flash management and acceleration software.
The companies’ combined forces will now provide the most comprehensive embedded storage management software portfolio to meet the growing global demand for data storage. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), these demands will grow to an estimated global datasphere of 175 zetabytes (ZB) by 2025. Meeting these global demands will require over 22 ZB of storage capacity across all media types from 2018 to 2025.1
Pushing the boundaries of data storage technology
Since 2008, Tuxera has been developing fail-safe, high-performance proprietary implementations of industry-standard file systems such as FAT, exFAT, NTFS, APFS, and HFS+. The company’s solutions have shipped in billions of consumer devices and vehicles to date. Tuxera also has its own high-performance file system, Reliance Velocity, as well as network storage and streaming software solutions.
“Together, we will continue to develop new features for our existing products and bring market-leading innovations in embedded storage. Our combined product portfolio addresses the full spectrum of storage management needs, allowing us to better support our customers’ current and future business and technical requirements,” says Szabolcs Szakacsits, President and CTO of Tuxera.
Datalight, founded in 1983, develops both flash file systems and flash management software, such as Reliance Edge, Reliance Nitro, FlashFXe, and FlashFX Tera. The company brings to Tuxera a deep understanding of technologies applied in flash controllers as well as file system technology used across many different embedded operating systems.
“We’re excited to join forces with Tuxera to create the industry’s broadest portfolio of data management solutions. Our shared experiences in “making it work” for our customers in diverse markets around the world gives us a common foundation on which to build innovative solutions to tomorrow’s data challenges,” says Kerri McConnell, CEO of Datalight.
All the leading expertise in flash management and file systems in one place
The engineering teams of the two companies combined now encompasses the top file systems and embedded storage experts around the globe. Their experience and understanding of storage technology covers any operating system or real-time operating system, any flash memory type, any hardware environment, and any interface, being either internal or external storage.
The merging of the two companies will bring significant benefits to any device, vehicle, or industrial products manufacturer with onboard or edge storage requirements. These benefits include:
- comprehensive storage management support for a broad range of devices from deeply embedded (such as microcontrollers), to vehicles, aircraft, and spacecraft, and for all consumer and industrial IoT devices
- improved file system performance, data reliability, flash memory lifetime, and hardware costs reduction
- data storage support for both managed and unmanaged flash memory
- industry-standard, fail-safe file systems like FAT, exFAT, NTFS, APFS, and HFS+
- industry-standard file sharing protocol support such as SMB
- flash memory quality and cost evaluation services
Transaction advisors
Nordhaven Corporate Finance acted as exclusive financial advisor to Tuxera. DLA Piper acted legal advisor, and KPMG acted as tax advisor.
Corum Group acted as exclusive financial advisor to Datalight, and Summit Law Group acted as legal advisor.
For more information, please contact:
Tiffiny Rossi
Head of Marketing, Tuxera
press@tuxera.com
About Tuxera
Tuxera is the leading provider of storage and networking technologies. From the latest flagship smartphones, to cars, cameras, routers, and drones – Tuxera’s software makes file transfers fast, and content easily accessible. The company is an active member of multiple standard organizations, including JEDEC, AGL, SD Association, UFS Association, and many others. Founded in 2008, Tuxera’s headquarters are located in Finland, with regional offices in China, India, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the US.
About Datalight
When data integrity, device lifespan and design flexibility matter, the world’s best-known device manufacturers rely on Datalight to enhance performance and speed time-to-market. Datalight’s flash memory drivers and reliable file systems improve user experience by boosting throughput, cutting file seek time, shortening boot time and eliminating data corruption in hundreds of millions of embedded devices worldwide. Datalight’s software, and expert consulting optimize solid-state storage for demanding product categories, including automotive, medical, retail, industrial automation and military/aerospace. Datalight is headquartered just north of Seattle, WA and has been developing embedded software since 1983.
References
Faster boot times mean less waiting—and safer cars
One way we develop new products and services is to simply sit down and talk with our customers and partners. For car makers and Tier-1 suppliers, a primary concern they've shared is reducing the boot time of car infotainment systems and instrument clusters. In boot-time optimization efforts, most people focus on the benefits to user experience—how long you must wait before you can start interacting with a device after it’s been powered on. In home laptop and smartphones, a fast boot time is mainly a factor of convenience and customer satisfaction. But for the automotive industry, there are also critical safety reasons and regulations that drive boot time requirements.
Boot time also plays a role in safety
Because you can put a car into reverse immediately after start, the rear-view camera system (RVCS) must show what’s behind you straight away. You also need important information from your instrument cluster before you jet out of your parking space, such as brake fault indications or your speed. Certainly, customer satisfaction factors into boot time as well, like getting driving directions as quickly as possible, or loading up your favorite playlists in a flash. Regardless of the reason—meeting regulatory requirements or improving customer experience—Ubiquitous QuickBoot by Tuxera significantly reduces the boot times of connected car systems—for up to 4 times faster boot times.
Boot time comparison
Tested on Renesas R-Car M3 Starter Kit // Cortex-A57 1.7 GHz DualCore // Automotive Grade
Linux 6.0 (FF) Actual performance may vary based on the hardware and software used.
Why choose Ubiquitous QuickBoot by Tuxera?
Our solution is designed for reducing cold boot time—or starting up from a fully powered-off state. This is the most reliable and desirable method for automotive applications, mainly due to issues with hibernation, snapshot boot, and sleep methods.
On top of the technical benefits, our engineers have nearly two decades of experience solving complex challenges in embedded storage performance. Because file systems play a role in boot time, it makes sense to put our world-leading team of the file system and Linux kernel specialists to the task. We have the know-how you need so your software engineers can focus development efforts in other areas.
Car makers and Tier-1 suppliers: let our engineers rev up your IVI or cluster boot times.
Ubiquitous QuickBoot by Tuxera
File system encryption ensures data security in connected cars
The growing demand for connectivity within cars exposes more and more critical embedded systems to security risks.
Car manufacturers and service providers are finding innovative ways to personalize our rides, or make in-vehicle purchases more convenient (some even automated—like toll booth fees). While these services bring a lot of value, they also demand that more private, personal data is stored inside connected cars. That means your car, if hacked, could essentially be a runaway credit card on wheels. Not to mention that embedded systems control the actual behavior of the car as well, and any compromise of these systems could lead to damage or harm.
A 2017 poll by American Insurance Group revealed that 75% of respondents expressed concern that autonomous cars, and even cars with autonomous features, could be hacked. Alongside these fears is the growing demand for connectivity within cars—even into deeply embedded automotive systems. As more critical systems become exposed to this connectivity, the security risks magnify. This means securing smart cars has now crossed far beyond securing just the physical networks on cars.
To protect consumer safety and privacy, connected cars must be secure at all levels—from the hardware and software inside, to the connections to the network and cloud. As an embedded software and services provider, most of what we do at Tuxera is situated at the core of the car. Our file system implementations are software embedded into various processing units within the car to provide reliable data storage management.
How is data inside cars handled and stored?
File systems manage the data that goes to various storage devices inside connected cars. They also play an important role in storage read and write performance, flash endurance, data and storage interoperability, and especially data integrity, which includes security. For a file system, security means ensuring that data it handles is not misused and/or altered by unwanted parties.
With several people using the same car—think car sharing, lending, or rentals—securing information such as contacts, web browsing, or credit card information is essential. So, it makes sense that the file system handling the storage of this information should have features to allow only authorized access to that data. One security measure that can be implemented at the file-system level is encryption. Encryption entails encoding data in a way which only authorized parties with the right “key” can gain access to it. The file system can implement encryption in different ways, each having some effect on CPU performance and processing speed.
How file system encryption works
Want to learn more about file system encryption? We've got a great write-up about it over at the Arm Community blog: "Fast, secure file systems for autonomous vehicles from Tuxera." Hop over to Arm to find out how file system encryption works and how Reliance Velocity (formerly Tuxera Flash File System) handles it.
Autonomous and ADAS test cars produce over 11 TB of data per day
Last year, we reported that an autonomous car will generate over 300 TB per year. That figure was based on the driving habits of the average American. But there’s a vast stream of data currently being generated by autonomous test vehicles every day all around the world. Take for example, Waymo, the self-driving technology development company. They recently reported that their test vehicles have logged over 8 million miles (nearly 13 million kilometers) on public roads, all the while collecting data using onboard sensors.
Calculating test vehicle data-storage needs
Pinning down exactly how many hours per day these test vehicles drive is difficult, as Waymo has not disclosed its fleet size. Forbes reporter David Silver estimated that 200 vehicles driving 8 hours per day at 15 mph would match Waymo’s reported mileage rate. Plus, as we reported in our earlier post, the sensors in an autonomous vehicle record between 1.4 terabytes (TB) to around 19 TB per hour. Combined with the Waymo estimates, we can calculate the amount of data generated by one autonomous test car ranges between 11 TB and 152 TB per day! Multiply that by an estimated 200 vehicles in Waymo’s fleet—that means Waymo needs to store anywhere from 2.2 petabytes (PB) to 30.4 PB of sensor data per day for their entire fleet.
And this is just the hypothetical amount of data generated and stored by one company. All the major car companies and suppliers across the globe also test drive vehicles with varying levels of autonomy, each collecting data of its own to store, process, and analyze.
Storing autonomous and ADAS data brings new challenges
As autonomous vehicles take advantage of various technologies used in advanced driver assistance systems (or ADAS), testing in this area is broadly categorized under ADAS research and development.
This R&D work brings new challenges in storing the massive volumes of data produced by test cars. These vehicles generally have a huge PC platform in the trunk, loaded with tens or hundreds of terabytes of storage provided by flash solid-state drives (SSD). The SSD arrays are swapped out for new ones as they fill, while data from the used SSDs is transferred to a server rack.
On top of the sheer volumes of data, the dispersed nature of the data collection and storage adds another layer of complexity. Test engineers pool data from tens or hundreds of these roving vehicles distributed across many different locations. Under these conditions, it would be much harder to guarantee the fleet’s data is always available for processing and analysis using traditional storage methods. This would require duplicating the data in the servers at each location—which would get extremely expensive.
Not to mention, there’s a lot more to ADAS and autonomous R&D than simply driving test vehicles on actual roads. A lot of simulated driving also goes on in the lab, using algorithms and input data to test and teach vehicles. Methods like software- and hardware-in-loop testing (SIL and HIL) allow test engineers to feed collected sensor data to ADAS software or hardware to see it how the system behaves.
Car makers and Tier-1 suppliers – find out how we can help you store and manage autonomous vehicle data.
Could fragmentation be your storage performance bottleneck?
It’s important for car makers and Tier-1 suppliers to choose their file system implementations wisely. File systems impact read and write performance of the storage, the integrity of the data stored, flash endurance or the lifetime of the memory hardware, and data and storage interoperability. Specific factors that affect file system performance include file size, device partitioning, or the file system implementations themselves. One additional factor Tuxera is currently testing is how fragmentation affects flash performance and lifetime.
What is fragmentation?
Fragmentation happens when a file system lays out files in non-contiguous parts, or fragments. It generally occurs because there’s no space left to write new file content next to older file content. Some recent groundbreaking studies into flash memory performance have shown that fragmentation is a bottleneck for or cause for degrading performance. It’s also a factor we’ve currently been testing in our performance benchmarking lab.
What are the potential impacts of fragmentation on user experience?
Our automotive customers and partners come to us because they suspect the file system could be a root cause of problems such as frame loss, latency issues, and other performance concerns. Fragmentation affects the long-term performance of flash storage. In applications with intensive reading, writing, and rewriting of data, (such as cameras for autonomous driving) fragmentation may cause anything from small errors to critical system failure. If the storage is full and heavily fragmented, there will definitely be read/write issues. This can’t happen in a mission-critical system where safety and lives are concerned.
In the case of infotainment systems, performance loss due to fragmentation boils down to concerns over user experience and customer satisfaction. If the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) storage is heavily fragmented, this means longer wait times for music and navigation apps to launch and be available to use. A minor inconvenience, but user experience is no small issue when it comes to differentiation for auto makers in the coming years.
So what's the answer?
Data-driven cars of tomorrow need intelligent storage software design today. Get everything you need to know about file system fragmentation—what it is, how it impacts storage performance, our research and test results, and how to solve it in our whitepaper, "The Impacts of File System Fragmentation on Automotive Storage Performance."
Book roundup: basics for aspiring QA engineers and embedded developers
Looking to brush up on some skills? We asked our developers to suggest some books to help budding embedded and Linux kernel developers, and here's what they recommended:
"Just automate it"
Pro Bash Programming
Scripting the GNU/Linux Shell
by Chris F.A. Johnson
“I suppose the age-old thought-sapping phrase 'Just automate it' applies. If you find yourself doing one thing a lot, it can probably be automated into a script. For example, if you are 'grepping' lots of values from many files (like test results) and you want them to be displayed in a table quickly on the terminal, you can write a solution for that. Or when you are doing testing and you need to create a specific environment many times, you can have a script that sets it up quickly without your attention required."
—Mikael Heino, Software Engineer in Test
Get deeper under the hood
The Elements of Computing Systems
Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schoken
"For quite a long time in my career as a software engineer, I had a very vague idea how computing systems work at levels below the application software that I was working on. Studying such topics as 'Operating Systems' or 'Instruction Set Architecture' seemed like an enormous task to me. Recently, I came across the book 'The Elements of Computing Systems' and the corresponding Nand2Tetris course. The idea of the course is to build a computer (both hardware and software) by yourself from the very basics and learn a little bit about every level of computing systems in the process.
As the name suggests, the course starts with an introduction to Boolean algebra and logic gates—the most basic devices that are used to build all computers today. Then we continue with building more complex circuits, including the CPU. After we implement all the necessary hardware for our computer, we start writing software for it: assembler, compiler, virtual machine, operating system, and finally, applications. At the end of the course, we have a computer that is able to run games such as Tetris!
Every chapter in the book covers a particular topic and includes a practical exercise where we implement some piece of hardware or software for our computer. To a certain extent, they resemble actual hardware and software found in real computers. As a result, operating systems, compilers, and assembly languages are no longer a black box to me, and I am not afraid to look under the hood if a need arises!"
—Rostislav Skudnov, Software Engineer in Test
If these topics interest you, we’re always on the lookout for great talent! Check out our careers page for open developer positions.
Automotive data storage and handling—now, the future, the challenges, and the risks
What better place than The Motor City—Detroit, Michigan, USA—for some serious car talk? At the 2018 TU-Automotive conference in Detroit, we had the privilege of interviewing experts from Harman, Renesas, Western Digital, and WirelessCar about data storage and handling in connected and autonomous cars. These companies are leading the way to help car makers store, process, secure, and create meaningful consumer services from all the data generated by connected and autonomous cars.
Watch the video to learn about the state of automotive edge storage now and in the future, plus get an idea of the various challenges with collecting and storing data across the industry.
Below you’ll find more about each company, and a transcript of the interviews.
John Buszek, Director of ADAS & Autonomous Driving Systems at Renesas Electronics
We asked John to start off with a brief intro to what Renesas does. Here’s what he had to say:
“We’re a semiconductor manufacturer invested in all different types of industries, but especially automotive. We're actually the largest manufacturer of automotive processors of any company in the world.”
Tiffiny: “How many different storages are in a car rolling off the lines today?”
John: “Well, there's all different types of storage. From the microprocessor perspective, some are in the chip, some are external to the chip. And when you think about how in 2016 we actually shipped over a billion processors, you're looking at at least a billion instances of storage in 2016.”
Tiffiny: “What do you think about in ten years from now?”
John: “I think you might see that reduce a little bit. The amount of memory might not reduce, but how discrete it is—how many locations might reduce. I think you will see a trend, it's hard to say how much, of a lot of electronics dispersed throughout the car—distributed architectures—you'll see them become centralized a little bit to offer some cross benefits: some ease of engineering in the vehicle.”
Oded Sagee, Senior Director, Devices Group at Western Digital
Oded first gave us a quick intro about Western Digital:
“Western Digital is one of the largest storage companies in the world, storage being media for storing data. We have a very wide portfolio of products ranging from hard drives through solid-state drives. I specifically am responsible for our embedded solutions—those are the small chips that go inside mobile phones—but obviously automotive subsystems today is a big growing market for us, plus surveillance cameras, and home devices.”
Tiffiny: “How many different storages are in cars rolling off the lines today?”
Oded: “Today we're still kind of leaning on design that started three, four years ago. In most of the cases, cars today have one storage device mainly for the infotainment and maps, although there are some cars already out there today with up to three storage devices. Some of the emerging technologies already deployed are obviously over-the-air gateways that have storage for firmware updates, and some digital cluster applications have the storage separate from the entertainment system. However, into the future, we're already now working on designs for cars that have five storage devices inside. So that's growing and expanding as we move along.
Tiffiny: “What about ten years from now? Will there only be a few?”
Oded: “Even in ten years, I think we're going to see all all sorts of types of vehicles. At a high-level we're going to have fleet vehicles, which are going to have a certain architecture of storage. We're still going to have consumer high-end and mid-range cars with different architectures, and we're going to have some fully autonomous cars. In between these three segments, I would say some are going to take a centralized storage approach with virtualization and hypervisors, but some are still going to have these subsystems with different storage devices. We may see those devices being shared in some form or shape, but still separate devices for subsystems.”
Tiffiny: “What are the biggest technical challenges in storing all this data in self-driving cars?”
Oded: “I don't know about self-driving yet. I think it's pretty far out, but in between now and full self-driving, the biggest challenge is obviously forecasting or foreseeing the future. There's still a lot of work to be done to determine what is the use case, how is data being used in the car, and how is data being used between the car and the cloud with all the connectivity and the data monetization that is going on. So identifying the use case—really understanding how it works—is our biggest challenge.
But then the other challenges that we have are obviously around the environment. The vehicle is obviously operating under a wide range of temperatures. It's a moving device, so between the mechanics and the temperature, that's probably our biggest challenge: how do we build devices that operate in these conditions, and then how do we build devices that keep the data in shape for a long time under these conditions. Those are probably the biggest challenges in the automotive space.”
Jason Bartley, Customer Program Manager at WirelessCar
First off, Jason’s brief intro to WirelessCar:
“WirelessCar is a connected car platform and services company. We started in the late 90s, launched our first program with Volvo cars in 2001, and in the last 16 years we've launched 13 different OEM programs.”
Tiffiny: “What are the biggest technical challenges in recording and storing all this data that's coming in from connected cars?”
Jason: “That's an interesting question. There are certainly a lot of those challenges. To me, the fact that we're getting more data and more complex data all the time makes us really analyze what database and storage technologies we're using. Plus, how do we relate the data, but do that in a way that we still anonymize, abstract, and protect the data so that we are certainly mindful of the customers rights and compliant with regulatory requirements such as GDPR, which is now an official requirement in the European Union. I think those are the biggest challenges we have these days.”
Dvir Reznik, Senior Marketing Manager, Automotive Cyber Security at Harman
Dvir’s quick intro to Harman:
“Harman is the leading Tier-1 company for the automotive industry. We develop a lot of software and hardware for the automotive industry, starting from digital cockpit solutions, to automotive cloud, telematics, UX, obviously the well-known brand audio from JBL and Harman Kardon—which we integrate into the vehicles—and cybersecurity. So, we do a lot of very cool stuff for automotive, and now for the past year with the Samsung acquisition, we're really building up on those synergies and offering the OEMs ever greater possibilities and technologies for their vehicles."
Tiffiny: What's the biggest challenge in securing all this data for connected and smart cars?”
Dvir: “I think that it's the unknown. Protecting anything unknown. Because from our perspective, you must have visibility into any type of security-related event that's happening in the vehicle. And this is certainly something that we're pushing with the OEMs and working with the industry to get more information out. I think that moving forward, you would definitely need to be more aware of what types of data are coming out of the car and how will we keep them protected.”
Could your car’s file systems be dragging you down?
We are honored to have been featured in a guest post on file system fragmentation at Western Digital’s blog. The following is a snippet from the original post. Be sure to read the full post here: Fragmentation and Storage Performance in Automotive.
Flash storage technology delivers high-speed performance that can cope with the terabytes of data generated by connected cars. But software also acts on top of that hardware, transferring data into and out of the storage. Over time, this software can slow down the performance of the storage. Our customers and partners often come to us because they suspect their file system could be a root cause of problems such as frame loss, latency issues, and other performance concerns. File systems can impact the read and write performance of the storage, the integrity of the data stored, flash endurance or the lifetime of the memory hardware, and data and storage interoperability.
Specific factors that can affect performance include file size, device partitioning, or the file system implementations themselves. But some recent groundbreaking studies into flash memory performance have shown that fragmentation is also a bottleneck for performance—and it's a factor we've been testing here in our lab as well. Fragmentation happens when a file system lays out files in non-contiguous parts, or fragments. It generally occurs because there’s no space left to write new file content next to older file content.
How can we reduce the impacts of fragmentation?
Data-driven cars of tomorrow need intelligent file system design today. At the Jedec Automotive Electronics Forum on April 10–11, 2018, our CEO Mikko Välimäki will be speaking in more detail about some recent findings on fragmentation, its impacts on user experience in connected cars, and how we can reduce fragmentation before it becomes a problem. If you’re there you can join him for the talk, or you can read more in our guest post at Western Digital’s blog: Fragmentation and Storage Performance in Automotive.
We’re revving up boot times at CES 2018
Our team’s kicking off yet another new year in Las Vegas at CES. This is our eighth year at the well-known global show for innovators and breakthrough technologies. To jump-start 2018, we’re excited to unveil our newest embedded development service, Tuxera Ultra Fast Boot. To get a feel for our new service, check out our teaser below:
Boot-time optimization is a critical need in the automotive industry, whether it's for meeting safety and regulatory requirements, or improving system responsiveness and customer satisfaction. Car makers and Tier-1 suppliers—let us get your most important features online rapidly. We'll cut your IVI or cluster boot times by up to 80% or more on Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), GENIVI, Android IVI, or others.
If you missed us at CES, see what embedded development and testing challenges we can take on for you.
How can we improve the participation of women in the tech industry?
In her TechCrunch article, Swati Mylavarapu of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers posed the question, "how can we collectively work to improve women’s participation in the tech industry at each key stage of their careers?"
In honor of International Women's Day, I spoke with Tuxera's own Eva Rio to take a closer look at how our company is working to answer this question. Eva is Service Designer and Marketing Manager at Tuxera, and also one of the lead organizers of the Finnish Android Association (now Google Developers Group Helsinki). Read on for the interview!
Tiffiny: What does Tuxera do to support women in the Finnish tech scene?
Eva: What we do is a combination of initiatives that come from the company as a whole, and from personal contributions from our employees. For example, I am an active member of Girls in Tech and Women Techmakers. Through Girls in Tech, I also mentor women who have recently graduated and are interested in technology. Also, our Head of People Operations, Satu Muilu, has organized coding classes in her neighborhood school, which place special emphasis on coding skills for girls. So just looking at some of our own personal efforts as Tuxera ambassadors, we have support for girls and women in tech from elementary school to university.
Tiffiny: And Tuxera as a company has also been closely involved with Girls in Tech as well as other initiatives, right?
Eva: Yes, that's correct. We've arranged visits and meetups for girls and women that study computer science or are otherwise involved in STEM. For example, we invited TKT-AKAT, the association of women studying computer science at University of Helsinki, to our office to learn more about our inclusive working environment.
We’ve also hosted a Girls in Tech Bootcamp, which was a three-day intensive course in design, business, and software. We contacted several influential people in the Finnish tech industry, along with our own people, to coach women interested in those tracks, and arranged workshops with them.
In general, we have an open offer to help Girls in Tech and other groups and associations for the same cause with whatever support we can. If we have some expertise in an area and they need it, we are always here for them. I think they appreciate that support.
Tiffiny: Do you have anything inspiring you'd like to share for International Women’s Day – perhaps specifically about the Finnish tech industry?
Eva: Speaking about Finland as a whole, I think we are doing a pretty good job of supporting women in tech – especially compared to my previous experiences living in other countries and from speaking to a lot of women of other nationalities who now live here. Let's keep up this high level of support for women and girls of all ages and always strive to improve. We should be an example for other countries to follow – that's what matters.