SSI Embedded Systems Programming

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Fact: 30% of SSI staff has twelve or more years experience

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Fact: Experienced Team Lead manages all projects

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Fact: All SSI staff is trained on the Quality Development Process

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Fact: SSI's Internal Software process operates as CMM Level 3

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Fact: SSI has been in business 16+ years

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Fact: Over half of SSI Business is from returning clients

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Fact: SSI client relationships last several years

"The best thing about working with SSI is that the people genuinely care about the success of the overall project. Typical contractors stop when they have merely met the letter of the contract that they are bound to; where as, SSI is willing to go above and beyond to drive a project to completion and ultimately success." ~ SSI Client

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Fact: SSI Supports Continual Employee Training

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The Customer

Ikadega, Inc. is a technology company that has developed a powerful, high-performance, low-cost, horizontal hardware platform that efficiently stores and delivers rich media content and other data files. This general-purpose data delivery platform serves as the basis for solutions across a number of vertical markets via I/O components that provide market- or task-specificity to the core architecture. Founded in 2000 and based in Northbrook, Ill., Ikadega is staffed with employees from leading technology companies, including 3COM, Allscripts, AT&T, Lucent, Midway Games, Motorola and Zenith Electronics.

The Problem

With the growth of the Internet, the need for high-performance, low-cost solutions for content storage and serving is growing exponentially. The use of broadband and wireless technologies is accelerating at remarkable rates, while new applications characterized by rich digital content such as streaming video and webcasts are being adopted by Fortune 500 Companies. In response to this exploding need, content delivery networks, such as those offered by Internet Service Providers, have been searching of effective and efficient business solutions. To handle the payload, the need to invent faster server and bigger storage media is evident. Understandably, the costs associated with scaling these existing storage and delivery solutions are increasingly disproportionate as performance demands continue to grow. Moreover, with processor speeds doubling every 18 months, and disk drive capacity doubling at twice that rate, it was clear that processor-based data delivery architectures, with their inherent bus bottlenecks, were increasingly incapable of delivering the huge quantities of data already required by the expanding Internet.

The SSI Solution

Recognizing this, Ikadega established an architecture, whose underlying fundamentals are based on data transfer instead of data processing. Ikadega designed a patent-pending "DirectPathTM Architecure" as the technology solution of choice for content storage efficiency and delivery performance. It will be the first to provide the throughput content providers required, while at the same time enabling them to store massive amounts of rich media content and large data files closer to the user, with an unprecedented low total cost of ownership.

Early on, Ikadega teamed with SSI engineers to aid in this architecture's software development. Together, development teams have discussed innovate way to maximize accelerated throughput on Ikadega's hardware platforms as well as take advantage of the architecture's internal non-blocking switched fabric, built entirely of FPGAs. Ikadega's unique architecture supplies an aggregate sustained bandwidth up to 40 times greater than that of single server solutions, at a fraction of the size and cost.

In the process, the architecture has adapted issues and implementations to bypass the kernel and minimize context switching. Such issues included memory and cache management, stack handling, server/client management, and file system stability.

Originally, the architecture was designed to simply be a big-performance multimedia server. FTP, HTTP, and QuickTime support were the targeted features. These form the basis of high-performance systems and solutions spanning multiple markets, including Internet-based streaming media, enterprise information services, and residential video-on-demand. However, the need to plug-in the DirectPath architecture into more networks became more and more evident. As a result, the DirectPath architecture is evolving to accommodate features such as NFS to become a general-purpose file system server.