In addition to the Legacy System Support applications, high performance Solid State Disk and wide bandwidth RAID may be utilised in many diverse leading edge applications.

Solid State Disk

Tiger is currently extending its range of K3E series products suitable for use as airborne mission, voice or event recorders, HUMS data recorders or as secure pre-mission data entry devices, utilising removable solid state media. Tiger is actively investigating a number of airborne and ground based applications and would be pleased to consider your particular needs or suggestions in the course of this work.

Disk Arrays - RAID and JBOD

Disk arrays based on wide bandwidth ULTRA-SCSI or Fibre Channel (FC-AL) can be used to displace large, tape based, secure event recording systems for both unmanned and manned operation. The advantage of fast, rapid access, disk arrays is the availability of the transactional operating mode, which allows analysis both during the data acquisition phase and during post processing. They are particularly appropriate for situations in which the data stored has a known shelf life with a rapid turnover measured in hours or days. This applies to several areas of continuous (24 x 7) intelligence gathering.
Such systems may be land based or naval, vehicle mounted or airborne, and may require appropriate engineering to met environmental or operational constraints.

Ruggedised Disk

Tiger has used various media to provide a facility on its emulator products to load or archive data to or from the emulator's solid state memory. Early COTS products used QIC-24 quarter inch tape for this purpose or "SyQuest" removable cartridge hard disk, provided the environment was relatively benign. Low cost "Zip" floppy drives are used for this purpose on the current K2E.

For military SSD emulators, sealed removable memory modules enclosed conventional SCSI 3.5" disk drives isolated by A/V mounts. Today, improved removable backup options are available with greater environmental tolerance and small physical size. The PCMCIA standard allows the use of small diameter hard disks, with consequently higher operating and standby shock tolerance, or solid state "Flash" memory. The latest Tiger sealed modules enclose and further protect these inherently rugged devices, guarding the module interface connectors from handling damage when removed from the host.

These modules and their receivers can also be provided stand-alone for general use in unusually harsh environments such as those found in:-

• Tracked and other all terrain vehicles
• Surface ships and fast patrol boats
• Submarine vehicles
• Fast jets, helicopters and reconnaissance aircraft

The Tiger modules provide further protection against ESD, mechanical damage, spray, pressure variation, shock and vibration, dust and humidity, and RFI. The issues of low temperature start-up and operation may also be addressed.

The type of data storage device used and the form factor achieved is dependant on the required data capacity and performance specification, together with the level of environmental tolerance sought. Due to the rapid pace of SCSI and PCMCIA product development, it is not sensible to publish standard specifications for the combination of Tiger module and storage device. Solutions can be provided for most common drive sizes and interfaces. Clusters of drives may also be considered for RAID or JBOD use, as will dedicated DRAM or Flash products based on Tiger's proprietary K3E SSD.

Contact Tiger, in the first instance, to discuss your application and specific requirements.