CASE STUDY: REVENTION, INC. Samsung Solid-State Drives Enable Ultra-Reliable Point of Sale Terminals for Restaurants and Bars OVERVIEW Customer Need Revention, Inc., a maker of high-performance point of sale (POS) terminals for the restaurant industry, decided in 2009 to switch from hard disk drives (HDDs) to solid-state drives (SSDs) to differentiate its terminals from competing products. But its initial experience with other manufacturers’ SSDs resulted in unacceptable failure rates. Samsung Solution After extensive testing, Revention selected Samsung’s 470 Series SSDs for use in its R2310 POS terminals. They proved so successful that the company upgraded to Samsung’s newer 830 Series SSDs in 2011. And when Revention introduced its next- generation R3310 POS terminals in 2013, it again chose Samsung SSDs, selecting the new 840 Series SSDs as standard equipment. Results Samsung SSDs dramatically improved the reliability of Revention’s POS terminals. Previously, up to 25 percent of other suppliers’ SSDs failed, often during initial assembly. Since switching to Samsung SSDs, however, Revention’s SSD failure problem has virtually disappeared, while customers’ complaints have become almost non-existent.
Transcript
CASE STUDY: REVENTION, INC.
Samsung Solid-State Drives Enable Ultra-Reliable Point of Sale Terminals for Restaurants and Bars
OVERVIEW
Customer NeedRevention, Inc., a maker of high-performance point of sale (POS) terminals for the restaurant industry, decided in 2009 to switch from hard disk drives (HDDs) to solid-state drives (SSDs) to differentiate its terminals from competing products. But its initial experience with other manufacturers’ SSDs resulted in unacceptable failure rates.
Samsung SolutionAfter extensive testing, Revention selected Samsung’s 470 Series SSDs for use in its R2310 POS terminals. They proved so successful that the company upgraded to Samsung’s newer 830 Series SSDs in 2011. And when Revention introduced its next-generation R3310 POS terminals in 2013, it again chose Samsung SSDs, selecting the new 840 Series SSDs as standard equipment.
ResultsSamsung SSDs dramatically improved the reliability of Revention’s POS terminals. Previously, up to 25 percent of other suppliers’ SSDs failed, often during initial assembly. Since switching to Samsung SSDs, however, Revention’s SSD failure problem has virtually disappeared, while customers’ complaints have become almost non-existent.
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THE CUSTOMERRevention, Inc.
Revention, Inc., a maker of high-performance point of sale (POS) terminals, has been riding the growth wave in restaurant technology. Founded in 2003, the Houston, TX-based company has grown rapidly to nearly $16 million in annual sales. Its intuitive, easy-to-use software and high-performance POS terminals provide a complete restaurant-management solution, which has attracted a loyal following among multi-unit chains and independent pizzeria operators. Now, the privately held company is expanding its product offerings to serve the fast casual and quick-service restaurant markets, as well as bars and nightclubs.
Revention is known for its customer-friendly, yet technologically advanced POS terminals, which allow restaurant staff to create and print guest checks, relay orders to kitchens for preparation, and process credit cards while simultaneously tracking sales, labor and inventory data in real time. Smaller restaurants may require only one or two terminals, while larger operations with multiple ordering locations may require a dozen or more.
Jeff Doyle, Revention’s CEO and founder, says his company tries to differentiate itself from competitors by being the first to offer the latest technologies. “We like to challenge our competitors by keeping the standards of technology and expectations at a high level,” says Doyle. “If there’s a better component that’s available, we’ll go to production with that component.”
Six years ago, Revention was one of the first restaurant POS terminal suppliers to offer biometric fingerprint-recognition scanners to identify users. It was also an early adopter of integrated payment card readers and high-resolution touch screen displays. So when the cost of solid-state storage fell to affordable levels, Doyle says, “doing the same thing with SSDs was a natural move for us.”
SSDs are making increasing inroads into the mainstream data storage market primarily because of their impressive speed and reliability. By using NAND flash memory chips, rather than spinning magnetic disks, to store and retrieve data, SSDs allow computer users to boot their systems, load software applications and copy and transfer files much faster than with conventional HDDs. And because they have no moving parts, SSDs also are far more resistant to shock, vibration and accidental physical damage than HDDs, while using significantly less energy.
Revention was primarily seeking better performance in 2009 when it began equipping its POS terminals with SSDs from two manufacturers. Yet even though the performance benefit of some of those drives was immediately noticeable, a disturbing number of these early SSDs simply didn’t work. “The biggest problem we were having was SSDs that were DOA (dead on arrival),” says Doyle. “We’d get the drive, put it in place and it was just dead out of the box.”
Although most of these failures were remedied before the drives reached the company’s customers, Revention also received occasional reports of power irregularities corrupting data stored on the SSDs.
Doyle says his company installed more than 3,000 SSDs from its initial suppliers in its early generations of SSD-equipped POS terminals. During that period it increased the drives’ capacity from 8 to 16 gigabytes (GB), then to 32, as SSD prices steadily declined. But with failure rates as high as 25 percent for some batches of drives, their unreliability was simply unacceptable. Even after Revention’s suppliers attempted to make corrective changes, Doyle says, “we were still seeing up to 7 percent fail rates.”
Clearly, it was time to switch SSD suppliers. First, however, Revention spent several months reviewing nearly every SSD on the market before deciding where to source its new drives. “We had every model bench tested, and put them inside of our units. We actually did quite a rigorous test,” says Doyle.
The company also asked some of its key restaurant customers to field-test the most promising SSDs in their highest-volume POS workstations, without disclosing which drives they were receiving. “They let all their employees use it, and when their hands-on reports came back,” he says, “Samsung’s SSDs blew everyone else out of the water.”
THE CUSTOMER NEEDBetter Performance and Reliability
As the world’s largest maker of computer memory chips and the largest global supplier of consumer SSDs, Samsung has unrivaled experience with solid-state storage technology. Samsung is the only SSD supplier to make its own SSD memory and controller chips, and this unique, integrated manufacturing capability gives it full control of every component, resulting in high performance and reliability.
Revention started using Samsung’s 470 Series SSDs in its flagship line of R2310 POS terminals in early 2011 and later that year switched to Samsung’s newer 830 Series SSDs. The SSDs’ 64 GB capacity was twice as large as the previous SSDs used by company, and their speed and responsiveness drew rave reviews from customers. “Overall, we’ve seen a major performance gain. It’s probably twice the
performance that we had on hard drives,” says Doyle.
But the most notable difference has been the dramatic improvement in reliability. Doyle says that out of the roughly 5,000 terminals shipped with Samsung SSDs through early 2013, only two have experienced SSD problems. “We’ve had almost no failure issues with Samsung SSDs,” he says. “We don’t have many vendors with a perfect track record, but I can honestly say that we’ve had a nearly perfect track record with Samsung.”
The new drives also appear to have resolved the problem of data losses caused by power irregularities. “Those issues have almost completely gone away,” he says. “Samsung SSDs have made our issues in the field go to where they’re almost non-existent.”
QUICK PROFILEAs used by Revention, Inc.
SAMSUNG 840 PRO SERIES SOLID STATE DRIVES Form Factor: 2.5-inch
Capacity: Available in 128GB, 256GB & 512GB
Host Interface: Serial ATA interface of 6.0Gbps; compliant with ATA/ATAPI-8 Standard
Sequential Read Speed: Up to 540MB/s for 256GB & 512GB models; up to 530MB/s for 128GB model
Sequential Write Speed: Up to 520MB/s for 256GB & 512GB models; up to 390MB/s for 128GB model
Random Read Speed: Up to 100K IOPS for 256GB & 512GB models; up to 97K IOPS for 128GB model
Random Write Speed: Up to 90K IOPS
Power Consumption: 0.15W
Encryption: AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption; Class0 Self Encryption Drive; user can set HDD password in BIOS setup mode
Operating Systems: Windows Vista or Later
Environmental Specs: Operating Temperature of 32oF to 140oF
Weight: 0.15lb
Warranty: 5 years
THE SAMSUNG SOLUTIONReliability Soars with New SSDs
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“We’ve had a nearly perfect track record with Samsung.”
Learn more 1-866-SAM4BIZ | samsung.com/business | @SamsungBizUSA
THE RESULTSSSDs Allow Fast, Last-Minute Software Updates
Revention used to pre-load SSDs with its standard software package and then install the drives in POS terminals during manufacturing. But this proved to be too inflexible, frequently requiring technicians to unbox and reconfigure systems before shipping to customers. Now it typically waits until the terminals are installed at the customers’ premises before plugging in the SSDs. That allows the company to wait until the last possible moment to customize or make changes to meet customers’ configuration requirements.
Revention uses high-volume imaging systems to install and configure software on multiple SSDs at the same time. And because software can be loaded much faster onto SSDs than HDDs, the imaging process now takes far less time than when the company relied on HDDs. “SSD imaging time is literally five to eight times faster than with hard drives,” says Doyle. “When you’re doing something 30 times a day and you’re shaving off 15 minutes each time, it’s just a major difference that’s allowed us to flex and move faster.”
Besides improved productivity, the faster software installation process has allowed Revention to avoid buying additional imaging systems to meet the demands of its growing business. “We were going to have to buy more imaging systems, which was a sizeable investment,” Doyle says. “But with SSDs, we haven’t had to.”
He says it has been two years now since the company bought additional imaging systems, each of which cost about $10,000.
Doyle concedes that Revention probably could have saved 15 to 20 percent by choosing less-expensive SSDs from other manufacturers. “But they didn’t come anywhere close to the quality that we were seeing with Samsung,” he says.
With about 60 percent of his customers now using terminals equipped with Samsung SSDs, Doyle says he’s very pleased with the performance, productivity and reliability that Samsung SSDs have brought to his company’s products. “I don’t think there’s a better offering out there that would meet our needs,” he says.
Not surprisingly, when Revention was developing its next-generation R3310 line of POS terminals for introduction in early 2013, it again chose Samsung SSDs – selecting 128GB capacity 840 series SSDs as standard equipment. And for good measure, the company also has recently upgraded all of its executives’ laptop computers with Samsung SSDs.
“Obviously, we’re big on performance here,” Doyle says. “We don’t want to be one-upped by the competition, so everything we do is fast. And we feel like everything we’ve put in place, including Samsung SSDs, is a part of that.”
