Telecommunications Switch Controller
Problem
First production systems using a particular switch controller were built 10 years ago with narrow SCSI disk drives, which have become increasingly expensive and difficult to find. Because the cost of qualifying a disk drive ranges up to $250,000, and disk drives models reach end-of-life every 6 to 9 months, this telecommunications customer incurred great expense for qualification, field documentation and support, last time buys, and inventory carrying costs.
Application
The telecom switch controller rack required 1, 2 or 4 GBytes of storage to hold the operating system and application software. Due to the age of the basic operating system it required a specific disk geometry.
Solution
Using custom designed brackets and cables, Adtron design engineers tailored an Adtron IDE-to-SCSI converter to match the functional, physical and electrical characteristics of the legacy SCSI disk drive. Adtron supports geometry configuration in the IDE to SCSI converter, allowing the disk drive subsystem to report exactly the geometry required by the system. A drop-in mechanical design allows easy production installation and field replacement.
Benefits
Adtron manages future IDE disk model changes through our proprietary qualification and characterization process to always deliver a consistent SCSI interface, command/status/response and physical form factor. This relieves the customer of the continuous qualification process, resulting in cost savings and assured long term availability.
Adtron Product
S35I3 -- 3.5-inch SCSI interface with an IDE disk drive as media.
