Test Drive: SuperCD Server

SuperCD Server
CD-ROM Server System
Axonix Corporation, 844 South 200 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84111; (800) 866-9797 www.axonix.com $1,895.

If your media center is like ours, you have several CD-ROMs that contain information you'd like to make easily available to all your students and teachers. The SuperCD server is Axonix Corporation's solution to sharing those CDs. SuperCD is a Linux-based server that automatically copies images of CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs onto its hard drive. It then makes these images available to users over your local area network (LAN) faster than a network CD tower or a DVD drive can. It's like having hundreds of CDs or DVDs available to everyone on your network without having to buy or manage hundreds of CD or DVD drives.

SuperCD is a small, mini-tower-sized computer. It needs no monitor or keyboard because it's administered via the Internet browser on your personal computer. Depending on the size of the hard drive ordered, SuperCD can cache up to 512 CD images.

SuperCD worked, as claimed, right out of the box. I plugged SuperCD in, connected it to a convenient Ethernet drop in my office, and turned it on. Accessing data with our lab iMacs was no problem. However, to access applications on the CD images, I needed a little help from our network technician. The SuperCD manual was very clearly written with a knowledgeable, but not necessarily expert, user in mind.

I could manage most everything through the browser on my G3 Macintosh. SuperCD performed flawlessly over our Novell 5.1 network and should work equally well over Microsoft, Banyan, and AppleTalk networks using TCIP protocol.

Axonix's SuperCD is a strong alternative to CD towers and other methods of serving CDs and DVDs. Once cached, the original CD or DVD can be safely stored. You can't save files directly to SuperCD as you can to other servers; however, you can build custom CDs and store those images. If you have many CDs that you constantly need to have available on your network, Axonix's SuperCD provides easy, speedy patron access.