Advanced Features of Edge storage Solution

Advanced Features of Edge Storage Solutions for Industrial, IoT, and In-Vehicle Applications

How do you minimize the service costs associated with in-field replacement of storage systems that are reaching end-of-life? How do you prevent inappropriate use of data on a storage device?

Advanced features of edge storage solutions were added to SP Industrial SD and microSD products that target industrial, IoT, and In-Vehicle applications:

• Health Monitor: Health Monitor can reduce both the incidence of in-field storage component failure and the cost of meeting customer expectations and service levels.
• Host Lock via CMD42 prevents unauthorized reuse and duplication of data.
• Host Lock via SDK enables Whole Drive Hidden and Partition Hidden features under Windows 10 and Linux OS to prevent unauthorized reuse and duplication of data.

Health Monitor

NAND flash is rapidly being adopted in Industrial, IoT, and In-Vehicle applications.
Industrial-grade flash solutions from SP Industrial are designed for use in a wide range of conditions with temperature ranges as broad as -40°C to +85°C plus high humidity. Furthermore, because flash-based products are solid-state devices with no moving parts, their performance and reliability are not compromised by vibration. This makes flash an ideal solution for Industrial, IoT, and In-Vehicle applications that require reliability under harsh conditions.

The process of writing data will cause a slight degradation of the flash cell itself. Consequently, data cannot be written to a flash storage cell indefinitely. To prolong the life of the flash device, a manufacturer employs a good wear-leveling algorithm, uses a strong error correction and detection mechanism, and builds the product with enough spare blocks to allow some of the blocks to wear out over time.

Usually, the durability of NAND flash storage is characterized in terms of terabytes-written (TBW) to determine how much data can ideally be written to the device over its lifetime.

The integrated Health Monitor feature for SP Industrial's industrial-grade SD and microSD cards provides a method of determining the health of a flash storage device in real-time in the field.

• SP SMART Toolbox Utility program for Windows 10 and Linux OS monitors the health status of devices, including power cycle count, abnormal power cycle count, initial bad blocks, later bad blocks and spare blocks, erase counts, and ECC uncorrectable counts. This intuitive utility program is an easy tool to check the health status of devices under Windows 10 and Linux OS.

• SP SMART Embedded provides seamless integration with edge devices to manage SMART information. For example, a storage management application in an IoT device or vehicle could check the health of the storage card on a routine basis. When the health report from the card reaches a certain threshold, the storage management system could prompt the message to display and proactively alert the driver to schedule maintenance; then, the driver can replace the worn card before it reaches end-of-life.

• SP SMART Dashboard was developed under IBM Node Red to integrate with SP SMART Embedded and provide a browser-based SMART information dashboard for connected Industrial and IoT devices.

• SP SMART IoT Sphere was developed under Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to integrate with SP SMART Embedded and provide a proof of concept of cloud service for big data analysis and alarm notification. A customer system can poll the card and receive a report on the health status after integration with SP SMART Embedded to manage data at the cloud site. The cloud server can manage and analyze SMART data. Once the specific SMART value reaches a threshold, the cloud management system can proactively notify administrators to alert the service agent to replace the worn card before it reaches end-of-life and avoid unexpected failure. With better awareness of flash health in real-time, customers can lower maintenance costs, improve service reliability, and increase customer satisfaction.

Preventing Unauthorized Reuse and Duplication of Flash Storage

One of the advantages of SD and microSD cards is that they can be easily removed and replaced. The data on a removable card can be reused from one device and inserted into another. However, it also means that any data stored on the device could be copied and reused in unintended ways.

If data contains sensitive information, data for VIP guests, or proprietary applications, one would not want such data copied from an SD or microSD card and leaked. The Host Lock feature on SP Industrial's flash offerings is designed to combat this kind of vulnerability.

SP Industrial’s SD and microSD cards provide two ways to enable the Host Lock feature:

• Host Lock via CMD42 to enable the Host Lock feature using a 128-bit password to prevent illegal or unauthorized access to user data under Linux OS via the SDIO interface.
• Host Lock via proprietary SDK to enable the Host Lock feature using an encrypted 128-bit password to hide the whole drive or a specific partition to prevent illegal or unauthorized access to user data under Windows 10 and Linux OS via a standard card reader.

Depending on a system's design, SP Industrial’s SD and microSD cards offer a Host Lock feature to help prevent a host without the password(s) from reading from, writing to, or erasing the device, and an unauthorized user from copying data and reusing it for an illegal purpose. Moreover, SP Industrial’s proprietary SDK offers a more flexible option for x86 platforms under Windows 10 and Linux OS without the limitation of the SDIO interface.

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