Plug & Stor 100 Puts Your Network On A Diet
By Jay Milne
Streaming video, multimedia, online training and other fat applications have driven your need for increased network storage capacity, but can you afford the time and money needed for yet another fat NT Server? Plug & Stor 100 EX-1, a thinner server from Creative Design Solutions, might be the right diet pill for your network. The list price, $1,349, is competitive with normal-sized servers, especially because you don't have to purchase any operating systems or applications. The unit comes with its own embedded operating system and includes a Pentium 166-MHz processor, an Ethernet port, SCSI port and 16 MB of RAM.
With its limited networking support, Plug & Stor is intended only for Windows NT networks or Web-based intranets. It also lacks a strong security model, making it bett
er suited for environments that need to add storage capacity quickly without the added features and flexibility of a standard NT or Web server. With Plug & Stor, you don't have to mess with your servers and shut them down to add SCSI adapters, or install additional drives.
Easy Does It
Plug & Stor doesn't require a monitor, keyboard or mouse. It comes with an auto-switching 10/100 UTP Ethernet port (using Intel's EtherExpress chipset), an internal hard disk and two or three SCSI channels (depending on the model). The three SCSI channel unit I tested in Network Computing's San Mateo, Calif., lab had both Centronic 50-pin and the high-density 68-pin SCSI connectors. The server does not support Token-Ring or other networking technologies.
Once I attached the unit to our network, I configured its IP address and subnet mask via the front panel. I used Netscape and Mic
rosoft Web browsers to configure the remaining tasks--formatting the hard disks, creating disk volumes, configuring security
and rebooting the device.
To see how well the unit worked with third-party hardware, I installed an external Seagate SCSI-2 drive and an external CD-ROM, both on the same SCSI bus. I easily formatted the hard disk and created volumes for both the hard disk and CD-ROM. Plug & Stor uses its own file format, but it also supports NT long file names.
If you need data protection, Plug & Stor provides the ability to do RAID 1 of two hard disks. However, the unit cannot span a volume over multiple disks, nor does it support other RAID levels.
I found a bug that caused the directory listing of the CD-ROM disk to be repeated in the directory listing in our Web browser and in the Windows 95 Explorer. Creative Design Solutions has documented this problem, but it was unable to provide a fix during testing.
Buyer Beware
Besides accepting a variety of devices, Plug & Stor implements access control to those devices via share-level, not user-level, security. Thus, you have to supply the sa
me password to everyone who wants access to the volume. Plug & Stor does provide two levels of share-level security: read-only and read-write. Moreover, only the root of the volume can be shared, preventing you from creating an NT share at any subdirectory below the root--something readily done in NT. The share-level security is easy to implement (a common theme with this product) but it prevents you from providing granular security that is more easily controlled. For example, if a user leaves the department, to prevent unauthorized access, you'd need to change the password for the common ID and distribute the new password.
Jay Milne can be reached at jmilne@nwc.com.
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Updated October 24,
1997
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