Blue Monitor's Storage group is a leader in providing end-to-end engineering services for leading enterprise data class and consumer storage vendors. The team brings a rich and diverse experience in managing and delivering complex products in data storage and enabling technologies with extensive expertise in areas like storage network management, storage systems and software, and storage devices.
Blue Monitor partners with some of the leading vendors in developing, sustaining data center class storage products and solutions - from architecture, design and development, sustenance engineering, consulting and deployment, product support to solutions that help storage products achieve SMI-S compliance. We provide the following services either for hardware or mechanical engineering or software or a combination: Develop the architecture and / or design
• Implement the solution to the required design and specifications
• Sustenance engineering interacting with customers' field
• Testing services
• We also provide the following system level and consulting services: System design and development
• Deployment and product support
• Professional services such as capacity planning, migration services etc.
• Data center management
• Blue Monitor 's storage system practice provides engineering solutions across the storage stack.
With a unique design flow methodology, almost a decades expertise in cost effective VLSI and board designs, a good knowledge on various EDA tools, collaboration with agencies for product manufacturing and certification, Blue Monitor is fully equipped to offer turnkey system solution - from architecture to prototype manufacturing of products including agency certifications. As a fabless design house we deliver our customers international quality design and prototype products, thereby our customers enjoy the time to market advantage ahead of their competitors.
Leveraging on in-depth expertise in diverse domains like computing, storage, telecom and datacom, automotive electronics, access networking, consumer electronics, medical electronics, mobile & wireless devices, storage, platforms and peripherals and industrial automation & control, we design and deliver the future of electronic products.
With development centers in Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai and Cochin, in India and Kiel in Germany, the VLSI & System Design Group provides its customers complete product engineering solutions in the VLSI domain, meeting critical time-to market demands of the customers with design reliability, scalability and facilities for upgrading.
With hardware expertise to match any of the biggest names in the industry, our solutions include high end ASIC development (front-end design, physical design, design for test, product engineering and prototypes), complex FPGA and board designs, turnkey system designs for new product introductions, core technology IP blocks along with complete verification and validation services.
• Blue Monitor's Turnkey Design Offerings Consultancy, design and development of:
Board
FPGA
ASIC / SOC
• Firmware and application software
• Mechanical chassis and enclosure
• Board level testing and system integration
• System validation and inter-operability testing
• System maintenance and sustenance
• Supply chain management (SCM) activities:
Procurement of components
PCB fabrication and assembly of components
Testing of assembled boards - JTAG / ICT tests
Manufacturing of mechanical chassis - plastic / sheet metal
Qualification of products to customer defined standards like UL, IEEE, NEBS, FCC standards
Shipment of assembled systems / products
Smooth transition to customer's preferred manufacturing house
Blue Monitor VLSI team is well versed with storage protocols and has hands-on experience in:
• SAS
• Serial ATA
• RAID
• ESCON
• Fiber channel
To enhance Time to Market for our customers, Blue Monitor has proactively invested in developing Standards based IP blocks which can be easily integrated into our customer’s designs. These are:
• IEEE 1394
• WLAN
• USB
• Bluetooth
• SATA
Blue Monitor VLSI team has experience in working with partners in storage system domain and storage device domain. Some of the work areas: Host bus adapter board design
• RAID controller ASIC verification
• DMA engine ASIC verification for storage area network
• Validation of NAS box
• Tester cards for SD, MMC and compact flash devices
• Verification of SD card
FIRMWARE
Cutting across product lines, including storage devices, embedded / consumer electronics devices, servers / platforms etc., Blue Monitor has delivered firmware for a variety of products over the years. The expertise accumulated span across a host of operating systems: VxWorks, RT Linux, ThreadX, Symbion, iTRON etc.
Blue Monitor has executed projects for Linux to make a complete distribution with drivers, protocol stacks and middleware, where several types of components were integrated; some components were taken from open source, some developed and some others licensed. Once the customer selected the hardware, this distribution was further customized / tuned per foot print and performance requirements; Blue Monitor also enabled the devices on board and wrote low level code, that was needed to bring up the board and the platform / application.
Some of the capabilities that we have in firmware development:
• Storage device firmware and device drivers
• Service processor firmware
• BIOS customization
• Board bring up and device drivers
• Diagnostic firmware
• Board management controller firmware
• Hardware management using IPMI
• Server management applications
OS ENGINEERING
Blue Monitor has over a decade of expertise in developing solutions and services around various operating systems such as:
• Unix variants
• Windows
• MAC
• RTOS
• Proprietary OS
• A strong focus on Linux
• Extensive experience in kernel enhancements, understanding of protocols & subsystems
• Blue Monitor also has extensive exposure to various hardware platforms: X86 variants
• Sparc
• PowerPc etc.
• PA-RISC
Blue Monitor has a rich suite of in-house tools to enable cross platform migration, assist in development and migration, static analysis of code under development - all of which enable the delivery of top quality code, well within planned schedules. OS Engineering Offerings Platform enablement (IA-32, IA-64, Opteron)
Blue Monitor has a dedicated Testing group that develops and provides expertise on testing methodologies across technologies and product types to various customers. The Testing division offers end-to-end testing services right from test planning to test design to the system and end- user testing. In cases where the product is under sustenance or / and subsequent enhancements are to be released, Blue Monitor can add value by regressing the code base and finding defects that are more difficult to find at this stage. When the test cases pile up over a period of time, Blue Monitor can help in bucketizing and prioritizing them, based on the value they provide, as well as automate the test cases to cut down the cycle time and subsequently the cost.
The Testing division has a special focus on storage systems. It has set up a separate storage lab, which our customers can take advantage of. A range of devices from HBAs, switches, storage media devices and NAS boxes get tested for various top storage customers on functionality, performance, interoperability, boundary conditions etc. In all the projects, Blue Monitor follows metrics driven testing processes and employs Six Sigma, Orthogonal Array and Lean methodologies for process improvement resulting in higher productivity and lower cost without compromising the quality.
Some of the key projects executed by Blue Monitor's Storage Testing group are:
• Complete engineering verification testing of a storage platform
• Complete design verification testing and system testing of a tape library virtualization product
• Interoperability testing for a tape library virtualization switch
• Interoperability testing for a HA & cluster file system
• GUI test automation for SAN management software
• Involved in design and testing of a backup / restore application for enterprise class Unix server platform
• Proofing of a distributed file system
• Developing FC error injection test suite
• Test suite to proof sharing of resources in a cluster
• Blue Monitor invested in developing certain tools and frameworks that are of importance and value in Storage Testing. Some of them are: SCSI / FC error injection tool
• Framework for testing GUI based SAN / switch management
• iSCSI target emulator
• Barrier synchronization testing tool
• Device and fabric simulators
• State, event and time triggered error injection framework
• Disk farm simulator
• Jammers, traffic generators & protocol analyzers - Agilent, Finisar, Smartbits, etc.
• Benchmarks - IOmeter, IOzone, SpecSFS, etc.
• Standards conformance test suites - Sanmark, SMI-S ICTP, SNMP MIBs etc.
TECHNICAL PUBLICATIONS
• Leveraging on the in-depth understanding of the product engineering life cycle, Blue Monitor offers expert services in technical publications to: Develop, maintain, and manage the documentation life cycle
• Develop complete, accurate, and accessible technical information
• Implement end user centric document customizations
• Services Portfolio
• Content development - product and process documentation
• Owner’s manuals / User’s guides
• Installation guides / Getting-started documents
• Configuration and management manuals
• Reference guides
• SOP manuals for support centers
• Service manuals / Parts catalogs
• Diagnostic and troubleshooting manuals
• Training manuals, tutorials, e-learning and CBT
• Product assembly documents
• Sustaining technical documentation sets
• Performing usability tests on manuals and updating
• Minimizing and single-sourcing
• Reviewing technical documents: manuals, guides, release notes, specification, design documents, and alert notices, etc.
• Graphics, illustrations and geometric modeling
• Online help
• File conversion from a broad range of file types into preferred file formats. e.g., Frame Maker into XMetal or Legacy to HTML / XML •
• Conducting workshops on technical writing techniques and tools
• Documentation management and contents for KM solutions
High quality expert services in documentation with unique value adds:
• Improved Documentation Process
• Enhancing the Peer Review Checklist with comments received from Editor and SMEs to avoid repetition of similar errors in the future
• Robust Knowledge Management System
• Encouraging knowledge transfers within the team by documenting and sharing knowledge gained from various projects with the rest of the team members
• Sharing tips and tricks of technical documentation
• Usability Testing
• Testing products during development of guides and providing suggestions that help to enhance the usability of the products
• Accessibility Compliance
• Active participation in XML Conversion Projects
PRODUCT SUPPORT
Blue Monitor is the largest integrated Product Support services provider from India, specializing in providing customer support services, technical support services, remote management services and bug-fixing and sustenance services. We have in-depth experience in helping companies execute offshore strategies to reduce costs, enhance quality, and improve customer satisfaction.
As pioneers of offshore based product support services for technology product clients, Blue Monitor has, in the past years, developed a model of integrating its storage technology and product expertise, customer interaction skills and technical troubleshooting and support processes, resulting in substantial cost savings and superior customer experience for leading storage product vendors. These, coupled with our quality process maturity and remote support experiences have helped clients to continue to realize strategic objectives in managing program for remote support services.
Blue Monitor capitalizes on the global delivery model to service the remote support needs of global technology product majors using several channels (voice, e-mail, web chat, e-services etc.) on a 24x7 basis. Salient features of this program include a dedicated datacom connectivity adequate for current and future needs of bandwidth for support processes. Blue Monitor also has a voice technology infrastructure using state-of-the-art voice architecture including ACD, call routing / management / monitoring systems which are used by the program. A documented, mature and proven redundancy process has been built across infrastructure, people and processes for providing a non-stop 24x7 support. Blue Monitor’s multiple facility availability has been used to provide additional BCP / DR.
As part of this committed focus to consistently deliver value to our customers, we have undertaken multiple activities within the process. Some examples of these activities:
Using lean shift planning techniques to plan shifts using Queuing theory. This has helped us reduce deployment of support personnel by 22% per week resulting in significant financial saving for the client in terms of head count costs.
An extensive Six Sigma study on the non-value-added dial homes in the process identified processes that would touch almost 45% of the non-value-add dial homes which may result in an over all reduction of up to 33% of the incoming dial homes. This has the potential to increase productivity of the support team and implicitly reduce support costs for the client.
A study of the type of cases that are escalated from the Blue Monitor support center to the next level identified additional training areas which will better equip our support engineers to handle all these cases locally. This means lesser escalations to the next level which will help reduce the overall case resolution time and also implies reduced support costs for the client and a higher end-customer satisfaction score because of reduced resolution times.
A Six Sigma project was initiated with a focus on reducing dispatch cases without impacting service quality. The target for this project was to achieve a 33% reduction in dispatches (to ~20% of calls) and the benefits accrued from this would essentially be annual savings from reduced dispatch costs. The project was executed successfully and resulted in a reduction in the number of dispatches and a substantial annual savings for the client.
MIDDLEWARE
Blue Monitor has a strong team skilled in systems programming and operating system internals. We have provided engineering services for Middleware products such as enterprise middleware suites, massively parallel databases and desktop environments.
Key Expertise Areas Virtualization
Database engineering (Optimizer, 64-bit porting, loader development, connectors and adaptors, performance tuning and benchmarking)
Enterprise application services (JES, Weblogic, J2EE, JVM)
Volume management
High availability
Clustering
Storage application framework
Specific Middleware Services Porting
Sustenance
Feature development
QA
Product support
STORAGE MANAGEMENT
Blue Monitor has a dedicated Testing group that develops and provides expertise on testing methodologies across technologies and product types to various customers. The Testing division offers end-to-end testing services right from test planning to test design to the system and end- user testing. In cases where the product is under sustenance or / and subsequent enhancements are to be released, Blue Monitor can add value by regressing the code base and finding defects that are more difficult to find at this stage. When the test cases pile up over a period of time, Blue Monitor can help in bucketizing and prioritizing them, based on the value they provide, as well as automate the test cases to cut down the cycle time and subsequently the cost.
The Testing division has a special focus on storage systems. It has set up a separate storage lab, which our customers can take advantage of. A range of devices from HBAs, switches, storage media devices and NAS boxes get tested for various top storage customers on functionality, performance, interoperability, boundary conditions etc. In all the projects, Blue Monitor follows metrics driven testing processes and employs Six Sigma, Orthogonal Array and Lean methodologies for process improvement resulting in higher productivity and lower cost without compromising the quality.
Some of the key projects executed by Blue Monitor's Storage Testing group are: Complete engineering verification
testing of a storage platform
• Complete design verification testing and system testing of a tape library virtualization product
• Interoperability testing for a tape library virtualization switch
• Interoperability testing for a HA & cluster file system
• GUI test automation for SAN management software
• Involved in design and testing of a backup / restore application for enterprise class Unix server platform
• Proofing of a distributed file system
• Developing FC error injection test suite
• Test suite to proof sharing of resources in a cluster
PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
Blue Monitor’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) practice provides innovative end-to-end PLM services. Our strong knowledge base in product engineering coupled with our high quality software delivery capability helps us provide innovative solutions to help our partners reach the customer faster and at lower costs.
Our Innovative, high quality business and industry specific PLM solutions are delivered through a dedicated team of domain consultants, certified professionals and quality experts. Adherence to stringent quality processes based on SEI and Six Sigma and our unique and 'self developed' Cook Book Methodology help our partners gain the competitive edge in their quest to win in the market place. We have successfully implemented solutions for leading computing systems and storage companies.
Our PLM services are delivered across various platforms:
Coupled with our development experience in storage systems and switches, Blue Monitor is better placed in delivering high quality software for storage systems. We provide design, development, testing and sustenance services for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) software.
• Our expertise
• Management software
• Archival solutions
• Backup and recovery solutions
• Replication solutions
• Data recovery and protection
• Some of the key projects executed are:
• Fiber channel switch based management software based on SMI-S / CIM as well as proprietary interfaces
• Host based storage management software suite
• Embedded management software for RAID systems
• Maintenance of web based management software for a NAS product
• Development of predictive failure analysis tool and automated firmware download tool
PRODUCT STRATEGY & ARCHITECTURE
Blue Monitor’s Product Strategy & Architecture (PSA) practice focuses on the strategic intersection of business, information technology and globalization. Blue Monitor’s PSA Practice combines deep technology expertise in IT and embedded systems, broad strategic planning skills, proficiency in global sourcing strategies and understanding of high-growth emerging countries. The PSA practice uses senior teams of technical architects and management consultants to help vendors, service providers, and large enterprises to document the business value of technology and global sourcing, and to develop product strategy and market-entry strategies.
PSA is focused on assisting clients in addressing a focus set of strategic areas by leveraging our business consulting and technology experience.
PSA partners with its clients to address a key set of questions:
• How to maximize top-line revenue and increase market share with current and future product portfolios?
• How to align products and services to market size and dynamics, and proactively address customer requirements?
• How to help customers measure the value of a technology investment utilizing financial and business metrics?
• How to create a strategic offering (e.g. product or service) plan, and shared vision of success?
• How to plan, organize and execute the strategy?
• What is the competitive landscape for a proposed offering?
PSA’s clients within vendor organizations are product managers, marketing managers, executives responsible for market strategy, competitive analysis and business development. PSA uses an integrated team of senior technical architects, engineers and consultants who bring both deep industry knowledge and experience in working with enterprise, service providers and other vendors in developing successful, long-term strategies.
PSA & Storage and Computing Systems
PSA has conducted many engagements helping storage and computing systems vendors develop a deeper understanding of trends in the industry for hardware, software and services. With this experience and deep technical knowledge of their products, PSA has provided strategic recommendations on how they can take advantage of these market opportunities.
In a project for a hardware solutions provider, PSA developed the strategic direction and defined the market positioning for the client’s leading enterprise storage platform. In the software space, PSA created the product roadmap for a storage management software solution. In the professional services space, of another project, PSA helped identify the market opportunity and business model for launching a professional services organization for an enterprise hardware solutions provider.
