Hyper card hosting from Lisle Design
Lisle Design has outlined the workings of its Hyper company card hosting system, which was designed to overcome USB limitations on computer operating systems.
These limitations meant that customers could only have a very limited number of individual card readers on a single server, says Lisle Design; but a critical part of the remote downloading process is card hosting on large scale.
“Over the past two decades we have provided customers with straightforward and reliable handheld and remote download tools,” said Mike Lisle, owner and founder of Lisle Design’s market leading Digidown brand.
“We have a reputation for problem-solving. So, when it came to card hosting, many customers kept showing us the makeshift solutions they had created to… host as many company cards as they could.
“Sophisticated remote downloading software was being supported by decidedly unsophisticated card hosting. Hundreds of card readers were, in turn, connected to scores of computers, servers and hubs.”
While such workarounds may have worked, says Lisle, they were unsatisfactory, resulting in untidy solutions and enormous IT overheads.
“The challenge we set ourselves was to create a solution that did three key things: overcome USB limitations; physically host hundreds of card readers in a logical and tidy way; radically reduce IT infrastructure and costs. The result is Hyper.”
Hyper is a Lisle Design card reader and protocol which allows users to host many hundreds of cards on a single server. These individual Hyper card readers are housed in modules of 20 or 30. These modules are designed to fit in standard computer racks 3U high and 19 inches wide.
The Hyper protocol has the added benefit of logical enumeration – i.e., whenever a server is rebooted, card reader 10 is always card reader 10 and so forth.
The protocol needs to be integrated into the remote downloading software that a company is using – which Lisle Design says is a simple process. Since its launch, says the firm, Hyper has been integrated with Dynafleet (Volvo), Scania software, TIS-Web (VDO), Teltonika, Transics, Xirgo, Tachofresh, DKV Telematics and many other popular software. Therefore, customers using any of these solutions can enjoy the benefits of Hyper.
“We seek to improve as much as possible”, added Thornton White, Lisle Design’s director of development.
“Soon we will have a version of Hyper which requires little or no integration. Not quite ‘out of the box’ but very close to it.”
For scenarios where integration is not possible, Lisle also offers HyperDriver, which operates with Windows or Linux. This allows the potential for hundreds of company cards on a single server with no integration process at all.
