CASE STUDY:

MDAQ E1 Monitoring and Data Acquisition System

Project Description

The MDAQ E1 Monitoring and Data Acquisition System is a legacy product family consisting of central office E1 monitoring racks managing several remote units of varied functionality. Their purpose is to monitor the remote end of the E1 Line as well as several I/O alarms on the customer premises. The whole system is configured locally by means of a PC based graphical configuration tool and managed centrally by means of an SNMP-based central Element Manager running on an HP UNIX Server.

The Business Challenge

All development on the system was halted in 1999 when the original owner of the product pulled out of the South African telecommunications market. In 2005 the new owners of the product approached Keystone Electronic Solutions in order to catch up on 6 years of maintenance and technical support for the product.

Managing Obsolescence

This gap in the time frames meant that Keystone Electronic Solutions first had to solve several obsolescence issues hampering the production of the various elements of the product family. We provided feasible replacements for the current obsolete components and also assisted the customer with a cost reduction exercise in order to produce the units at a competitive cost once more.

Upgrades to reduce costs

The Keystone Electronic Solutions software team then assisted the client by fixing the backlog of outstanding defects in the embedded software of all the elements in the product family. Updates to the software were also needed where obsolete components were replaced with alternatives that were not completely functionally compatible. Our FPGA design team also ported the existing FPGA designs to more cost effective device alternatives, in some cases resulting in a 60% reduction in cost.

Improving System Response

Keystone Electronic Solution engineers re-wrote large parts of the UNIX based SNMP Element Manager in order to significantly improve the overall system response over the existing legacy communication channels.