COTS Plus Innovation for Fault-Tolerance (CIFT)

SYSTRAN, a products-oriented small business, designs, develops, manufactures, and supports computer communications network interfaces for heterogeneous systems in both defense and commercial application. We are manufacturing (to ISO-9001 quality standards) an array of Fibre Channel based, network interfaces and switches applicable to Ggabit/sec interfacing of heterogeneous computing resources; this is our FibreXpress COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) product family. In Phase I, SYSTRAN will investigate fault-tolerant techniques that can be coupled with our standard family of FibreXpress communication products. We will use the QFD (Quality Function Deployment) method for delineating and ranking functions and features that might be either (1) added to the next version of our traditional non-fault tolerant commercial grade products to improve their individual fault-tolerant behavior or (2) incorporated into new products that, working in conjunction with standard COTS products, can provide a fault-tolerant communications system. As several of our world-wide customers are defense avionics manufacturers, we will obtain specific criteria and insights from selected customers (at least 8) to use within our analysis and decision process. Finally, we will specify and approach to demonstrating (in Phase II) how these COTS products, and some new unique functions, features, and topologies, can provide fault-tolerant behavior.