Home » Resources » Success Story: Reliance-Hypercom-Financial

Success Story: Reliance-Hypercom-Financial

Datalight® Reliance™ File System Prevents Data Loss for Hypercom® Electronic Payment Terminals

The Challenge

Widely recognized as the leader in global payment technology, Hypercom® delivers electronic payment solutions that add value at the point-of-transaction for consumers, merchants and acquirers, and yield increased profitability for its customers. The company recently moved its base terminal technology from an 8-bit CPU, proprietary OS platform to a 32-bit XScale, Nucleus OS platform. While testing the new terminal’s ability to withstand power outages, the development team found critical file system problems—including files and folders disappearing and incorrect file attributes.

In an effort to solve the problem and ensure low field failure rates, the team started writing a chkdsk utility for Nucleus. This effort was abandoned due to rising time-to-market pressure and the realization that they did not have sufficient in-house expertise. Hypercom then decided against using an open source file system—the time it would take to port a Linux program to Nucleus would not allow them to certify their new product on schedule. The team needed to address the issue immediately or Hypercom would risk losing sales due to unacceptable field failure rates.

The Datalight Solution

Hypercom approached Datalight® to find out more about our fault-tolerant transactional file system for embedded devices called Reliance™. Based on the concept of transaction points, Reliance ensures that file systems are always in a valid state. Unlike FAT-based file systems, Reliance is specifically designed for devices that operate in environments where system crashes or power interruptions may occur. After a thorough review of the technology, Hypercom asked Datalight to help them implement Reliance into their prototype system.

Through a close partnership and joint testing, Datalight and Hypercom proved that Reliance was the solution to their problem. It securely preserved electronic payment information and other critical data, even if power was lost or the system crashed.

The Customer Payoff

By choosing to incorporate Datalight’s Reliance file system into their design and not continuing to develop their own fix, Hypercom quickly solved the critical problems and successfully completed their new electronic payment terminals. Not only were the risks of field failures eliminated, Hypercom was also able to offset the cost of implementation by getting to market faster than planned. Now Hypercom’s merchant and financial customers enjoy the new line of Optimum terminals—complete with better security, more graphics features, and faster performance.

NEWS