The Software Story
 
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A DVD jukebox is only as good as the software that drives it, so you'll want to try a few different jukebox management software products before you move your library onto the production network. Because there are over a dozen different products, some from very small vendors, a good place on the Web to start your investigation is at www.maxoptix.com/html/techcomp.htm.
How we did it
Plasmon's AllStor NetReady server
Alphabet soup - A guide to the various disc formats
Interactive Scorecard and NetResults
Archive of Network World reviews
Subscribe to the Product Review e-mail newsletter
The software you pick depends on how manageable your library is, how your network administrators set up shared directories and whether you can fill your jukebox with CD-Rs and ordinary CD-ROMs as well as DVDs. We tried three products: NTIOMstore from NTIOM Systems; SmartStor Archive from Smart Storage, Inc.; and Point Jukebox Manager from Point Software and Systems. We chose Point's manager for our tests because it was very easy to manipulate the data on different DVDs. It was also the most robust at recognizing each of the three jukeboxes we attached to our NT server and seemed to be a good performer overall. The software ranges in price from $3,600 to $5,900, depending on jukebox configuration. An important issue for network administrators is to be able to fill the entire jukebox full of media and then only make available a disc at a time to the network. This makes it easier to manage the storage and not have to frequently visit the jukebox. All three products support this, although Point's software was the easiest to operate in this fashion. One problem we had with Point's software is the ability to recognize a mixture of DVDs and CD formats in our jukebox drives. We found a bug in the software that required us to delete a registry key in order for it to read the various CD formats in jukeboxes that just had DVD drives. This is a good example of the level of detail you'll need to dig into to get these products working and also the level of software immaturity. NTIOM (www.ntiom.com) was the most quirky, requiring its own SCSI unformatted magnetic disk that it uses for caching information from the jukebox library. The other two could store the cache on standard NT disks. SmartStor (www.smartstorage.com) had the most controls and features, but the current version, 3.1, didn't handle mixed media jukeboxes and was harder to set up, using a combination of NT services and applications to handle each jukebox. The company claims a new version should be available soon to handle mixed media. But it does have the ability to set up a single shared directory that could span several disks, a useful feature for network administrators. Of the three, NTIOM was the only one that could format DVDs with the native NTFS file system. SmartStor uses the UDF format, which is useful if you want to export your DVDs from one library and read it with another software product. PointSoft uses the FAT format. These formats aren't really that important, since outside of UDF, you won't be able to take one DVD-RAM disc created in one format by one software product and be able to read its data in another software product that uses a different product. Support from all three vendors was good and also essential, given our problems. Our questions were answered quickly and precisely, and given the numerous problems we had with our equipment, we made lots of calls and e-mails. And even though both Point and NTIOM are based in Europe, we had no trouble getting help when we needed it. We wish all networking companies could be as responsive.
How we did it
Plasmon's AllStor NetReady server
Alphabet soup - A guide to the various disc formats
Interactive Scorecard and NetResults
Archive of Network World reviews
Subscribe to the Product Review e-mail newsletter
The software you pick depends on how manageable your library is, how your network administrators set up shared directories and whether you can fill your jukebox with CD-Rs and ordinary CD-ROMs as well as DVDs. We tried three products: NTIOMstore from NTIOM Systems; SmartStor Archive from Smart Storage, Inc.; and Point Jukebox Manager from Point Software and Systems. We chose Point's manager for our tests because it was very easy to manipulate the data on different DVDs. It was also the most robust at recognizing each of the three jukeboxes we attached to our NT server and seemed to be a good performer overall. The software ranges in price from $3,600 to $5,900, depending on jukebox configuration. An important issue for network administrators is to be able to fill the entire jukebox full of media and then only make available a disc at a time to the network. This makes it easier to manage the storage and not have to frequently visit the jukebox. All three products support this, although Point's software was the easiest to operate in this fashion. One problem we had with Point's software is the ability to recognize a mixture of DVDs and CD formats in our jukebox drives. We found a bug in the software that required us to delete a registry key in order for it to read the various CD formats in jukeboxes that just had DVD drives. This is a good example of the level of detail you'll need to dig into to get these products working and also the level of software immaturity. NTIOM (www.ntiom.com) was the most quirky, requiring its own SCSI unformatted magnetic disk that it uses for caching information from the jukebox library. The other two could store the cache on standard NT disks. SmartStor (www.smartstorage.com) had the most controls and features, but the current version, 3.1, didn't handle mixed media jukeboxes and was harder to set up, using a combination of NT services and applications to handle each jukebox. The company claims a new version should be available soon to handle mixed media. But it does have the ability to set up a single shared directory that could span several disks, a useful feature for network administrators. Of the three, NTIOM was the only one that could format DVDs with the native NTFS file system. SmartStor uses the UDF format, which is useful if you want to export your DVDs from one library and read it with another software product. PointSoft uses the FAT format. These formats aren't really that important, since outside of UDF, you won't be able to take one DVD-RAM disc created in one format by one software product and be able to read its data in another software product that uses a different product. Support from all three vendors was good and also essential, given our problems. Our questions were answered quickly and precisely, and given the numerous problems we had with our equipment, we made lots of calls and e-mails. And even though both Point and NTIOM are based in Europe, we had no trouble getting help when we needed it. We wish all networking companies could be as responsive.
RELATED LINKS
Strom was the founding editor in chief of Network Computing magazine and published his own essays called "Web Informant." He can be reached at david@strom.com.
How we did it
Our testing methods revealed.
Interactive Scorecard and NetResults
See how we scored various DVD-RAM jukeboxes - and check how the results would change if you adjust the importance of various criteria.
Plasmon's AllStor NetReady server
Comes with its own built-in Web server.
