Rambus Success Story

Overview
Headquartered in California with regional offices in North Carolina, Taiwan and Japan, Rambus Inc. (Nasdaq: RMBS) is one of the world's leading providers of advanced chip-interface products. Since 1990, the company’s innovations, breakthrough technologies and integration expertise have helped industry-leading chip and system companies solve challenging, complex I/O problems and bring products to market faster. Customers deploy Rambus interface solutions in numerous computing, consumer, and communications products such as those offered by Cisco, Dell, Intel, Samsung, Sony, Texas Instruments and Toshiba. Rambus solutions also enable state-of-the-art performance for users of PCs, video game consoles, printers, digital TVs, set-top boxes, printers, video projectors, network switches and routers.

Challenge:
The Rambus chip design process relies heavily on precise timing among 10 servers, on which designers run batch jobs that access files pertaining to the design of thousands of different systems and chip. “If the time stamp of just one file drifts off precise time, the entire batch job will not run causing our designers to lose valuable time,” explained Gary Bridgewater, IT Manager for Rambus. “Our engineers might start a batch job in the morning but not check on it until noon. If it did not run, they’ve lost valuable time.”

To synchronize time on servers and user workstations, Rambus utilized a free Internet time source. But every now and then, one of the servers would fall out-of-sync with the other nine servers. “It doesn’t matter so much if time is off slightly,” Bridgewater said. “But all of our servers must register the same time — preciseness is critical.”

As Rambus began to move into a new building in 2001, Bridgewater decided to take total control over the time on the network.

Solution:
Bridgewater determined that the most effective way to provide accurate and precise time across the network was to install a time server with an antenna that accesses the global positioning system (GPS) of satellites. “Moving into our new building made installing a system like this more feasible because we now have access to the roof where the antenna needed to be installed,” Bridgewater said.

Symmetricom helped Bridgewater choose the Symmetricom NTS-200 Network Time Server as the best fit for Rambus. The NTS-200 synchronizes clocks on servers and workstations across entire networks. The time server also provides reliable, secure network time synchronization by combining a high-speed, high-capacity network interface, versatile GPS timing, a web-enabled user interface, as well as network protocol support.

One of the features of the NTS-200 that Bridgewater appreciates most is the access to the Internet time as a back-up, if necessary. “The system itself is very reliable, and we don’t expect it to have any problems,” he explained. “But there’s always a chance that weather will knock down an antenna, so it’s good to know that we can rely on another time source.”

Results:
Rambus handled the installation of the NTS-200 appliance on its own and hired a wiring contractor to install the wire connecting the antenna to the NTS-200. Bridgewater and his staff then installed the antenna, and the NTS-200 immediately connected to the GPS satellites.

“Since we were already using the network time protocol (NTP) internally, there wasn’t a lot of work to do on our servers and workstations,” Bridgewater said. “We just configured all of our devices to point to the IP address of the Symmetricom time server, and all of our devices began to register precise, accurate time.”

Rambus and its 235 employees have relied on the NTS-200 for three years without any time-synchronization problems. Because the appliance has worked so well, Rambus purchased a second unit that it will be deployed at its North Carolina facility, where users there will rely on accurate and precise time. “With multiple sites, accuracy and preciseness become even more important,” Bridgewater said. “Our chip designers can rely on time stamps coming from files at both locations.”

Another benefit of the second location is that each site’s time server can use the other site’s server as a backup. “Instead of relying solely on the Internet, we can now depend on a time server appliance to provide time we can trust,” Bridgewater said.