HIARC Sparcus

Installing Sparcus is incredibly simple and quick. With Sparcus' graphical tools, we were able to bring up the HSM daemons, as well as configure and manage our HSM volumes. With other software, we had to check the process table to see if the software was up. We found that only Alphatronix' tools were easier to use.

In addition to the GUI tools, Sparcus, like others, offers command-line and ASCII tools for quick changes or migrations. Unlike the others, though, Sparcus' command-line utilities were easy to understand and straightforward.

With a few clicks and drags, we had our file system set up for migration based on many different attributes. However, during our testing we found it that it was just as easy to force migration using the command-line utilities. Once configured, the HSM software took over and migrated files back and forth with no administrator intervention.

Although there are no glaring faults in Sparcus' operation, HIARC's solution is specifically designed for the Sun crowd. In addition, we think a more distributed solution would fare better in the marketplace. With the growing size of networks and limited budgets, having HSM software and hardware for each station is not the best idea.