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CD-ROM Servers Play a Vital Role November 1, 1999 By Mike Avery CD-ROM servers are a lot like broccoli: They're not glamorous, but they're really good for you. CD-ROM servers can lighten the load of system administrators and help control costs. Installing software over the network via a CD-ROM server saves departments the hassle of individually installing and tracking a mountain of CDs. And budget-wise, it makes sense to purchase networked copies of software rather than individual copies. There are alternatives, of course. Some system managers have found that it's inexpensive to add a large hard disk to a network server and copy the CDs to be shared to the network drive. When this process works, it's a fast way to move data around, but some applications don't run that way. Also, if your security isn't tight, someone could alter the copied data. Trying to explain how pornography replaced the images in an online encyclopedia can be a career-redefining experience. With the growing availability of high-speed Internet connections, it may be easier and cheaper to purchase access to a database than to maintain a local copy. Access speed to the remote database can be enhanced by the use of a proxy server. But even with this performance boost, it's unlikely that the access will be as fast--or as reliable--as access to a local copy of the database. A CD-ROM server is a better choice. We tested five CD-ROM servers and one DVD server designed for departmental use. The top-performing Procom Technology DataForce 110 impressed us with its broad compatibility, snappy performance and reasonable price. Meridian Data's CD Net Universal XP Cache finished a relatively distant second, hampered by a higher price, slower performance and compatibility problems in our Novell NetWare tests. Hewlett-Packard Co.'s SureStore CD-ROM Server Plus and CD/DVD-ROM Server, Pioneer New Media Technologies' DRM-6NX Network Cache Changer, and Boffin's KwikDisc rounded out the pack. We tested data access to the CDs via NetWare and Microsoft Windows NT. And we're happy to report that neither the network servers nor the client PCs required special drivers to access the data. The CD-ROM servers convincingly mimic the servers on your network. You can grant and revoke access permission through your usual NOS utilities. The servers, in essence, become part of your domain or NDS tree. All the devices we tested can handle seven to 10 CDs, or the images of that many CDs. These units also clearly show that commodity products can differentiate themselves. HP, Meridian and Pioneer use various versions of a CD-ROM server controller from Axis Communications. Boffin uses Microtest's Zerver as a controller, which is similar to the Axis controller, but it generated more NetWare compatibility problems in our tests. To its credit, Procom's own controller was able to work with everything we threw at it. Because almost all the products had compatibility problems in our NetWare tests, we based our scores only on the NT client tests. Besides serving data to NetWare and NT clients, these servers can share data as NFS mountable volumes via Web interfaces and often via FTP. All are configurable over the Web.
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