infoTECH Feature

March 21, 2011

Amfeltec System Logger Debuts at ITEXPO, Pockets Innovation Award

At the recently-concluded ITEXPO (News - Alert) East 2011 in Miami, TMC’s CEO Rich Tehrani interviewed Alex Feldman, the director of product management at backup provider Amfeltec.

Amfeltec is a Toronto-based company specializing in hardware and software development, electronic design and manufacturing and appliance marketing, with a focus on smart devices. Feldman noted that the company was using the show to feature a newly-released product, the Batteryless System Logger.

As Feldman explained the target market is made up of companies manufacturing appliances with embedded systems: “Companies that bring an embedded system to the customer, they need this device, to make their product more reliable and stable.”

This is a nifty product for the embedded market, as it captures system log information from a serial port in embedded systems. Should aforesaid system go down for any reason, power failure, crash or whatever, the System Logger, which is powered from the serial port, has the log information safely tucked away in an internal flash memory. “It has no battery inside,” Feldman said, and “it does not require any maintenance.”

As TMC’s (News - Alert) Chris DiMarco wrote in news coverage of the release, Amfeltec was actually awarded TMC’s most innovative product awards for the device, which “offers system logging for computing systems that cannot otherwise be serviced,” DiMarco reported.  

As Tehrani observed, with “no moving parts,” it’s highly reliable. “No hard disk, no file system, you just connect it,” Feldman said. And it’s easy to get to work: Just plug the logger into a serial port, redirect the messages into the serial port and there you are. No additional software or patches, just an app to read the data from the logger itself.

What market is Amfeltec angling for here? Whose problem does this solve? A company might reasonably ask, as Feldman noted, “Why do we need this when we have the log information in our hard drive?” Does your system ever crash? Might your system ever crash? Does the power ever go out? What happens to all your log information then? Do you know that you’ll always be able to get it back? Probably not this side of Heaven, hence the Batteryless System Logger.”

It’s an elegant piece of technology in that it’s dedicated to doing one thing and doing that one thing well -- capturing log information at all times. Feldman said that the U.S. Patent Office granted a patent to the key technology used in the System Logger just before ITEXPO.


David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Tammy Wolf
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