As data storage demands for Industrial IoT (IIoT) edge devices such as intelligent sensors increase, new requirements for storage software are emerging. Datalight is bringing its expertise to these highly resource-constrained, hard real-time systems through purpose-built products leveraging our data storage technology and expertise.

Many market-leading OEMs in the ruggedized segment of the industry have adopted Datalight's flash memory and file system technology to create end-user products that are winning reliability awards and delighting their customers. Many of these products have complex use cases and multiple applications with products like handheld terminals, fleet management computers, industrial automation controllers, and medical diagnostic and treatment devices, so data storage has been a priority.

As designers make IIoT devices smarter, a common design goal is for the intelligent device to operate autonomously and adjust its behavior based on data-driven decisions. The goal is to save time, money, and even lives. The ability of the IIoT device to accomplish this mission hinges upon reliable availability of decision-quality data. These emerging require reliable storage over the entire lifetime of the device that won't require a complex and risky software update or a trip to Mars to work around a failing flash memory device.

In the brave new world of IIoT, data can be rapidly collected and has potential to be transmitted up to the cloud for storage. But this doesn't mean designers should neglect the integrity of their primary, on-device data storage. You might be thinking, "I don't have to store it locally," but is there a connection available all the time? Will network data traffic cause an unrecoverable timeout? Have you accounted for degradation of hardware performance over time?

If the data on your device can't be reliably saved or retrieved, it doesn't matter how good you make your application or the hardware you produce. Reliable data storage needs to be treated as an asset and or it becomes a liability.

Datalight
www.datalight.com