August 1999
Coming Attractions
ADIC, AllStor, KOM and Qstar Jukebox Management Systems Compared
There are at least four jukebox management systems on the horizon that we plan to test as they’re released in the coming months. All of these vendors are shipping current product, but they’re planning upgrades that we want to test.
Optistorm software from KOM (Kanta, Ontario, Canada) manages MO, DVD and CD, and the company has added features like true WORM support, invisible volumes for security, and Unix-like mountpoints. The software is designed to allow maximum flexibility for administrators in setting up user access. For example, Optistorm’s mountpoint technology allows different combinations of disc volumes under management to be shared in many different ways by different users and groups.
On the media side, Optistorm formats both MO and rewritable DVD using NTFS. While this allows discs to be easily transported from system to system, it may lead to some problems on the DVD side since UDF, not NTFS, is the standard way of formatting DVD discs. Support for media like CD and tape are through add-on modules or separate applications, as is HSM support.
KOM’s forthcoming Optistorm 4.0 release promises new ways to share optical volumes among users as well as new media handling technology.
Allstor, a software and hardware company based in the UK, makes Enterprise Library Manager, a storage management system for CD, DVD, magneto-optical and tape libraries. Originating on the Unix platform, the company’s prime objectives for their software are high availability and ease of management through a Web interface. According to Simon Copeland, Allstor’s CEO, optical systems have not been able to break out of document imaging and management applications because they don’t have the redundancy features found in RAID subsystems and tape libraries.
For example, if a jukebox management system’s database goes down, the system has to rebuild the database from scratch by mounting and scanning every disk under management — a time consuming process that can be deadly in a mission-critical environment. Allstor has the ability to mirror its filing system on other storage volumes. If one drive goes down, the filing system can be recovered from a mirrored copy.
To improve ease of management, Allstor includes an HTML-based administrator. The software has a built-in Apache Web Server that serves the Web-based front end. Regardless of whether Allstor is running under Windows NT or on a version of Unix, it can be managed from any Java-capable Web browser.
Allstor is a subsidiary of storage hardware supplier Plasmon. While it has widely marketed its products in Europe, Allstor is now eyeing the North American market and has opened a sales office in Ranch Santa Margarita, CA.The new version expected in the third quarter will feature improved Windows compatibility, including a new GUI to replace the current Unix-like user interface.
Amass jukebox management software from ADIC (Redmond, WA) has been available for Unix users for years, but Amass for Windows NT will be the first foray into the Windows space. Early views of the product, which is offered by tape hardware maker ADIC, were promising. It has an easy-to-use interface and the ability to manage tape autoloaders and libraries as well as optical media.
According to Adic, Amass for Windows NT’s caching will allow users to access files one byte at a time. The theory is that if a user wants a small piece of a large file, say a scanned image, their system can deliver that small piece alone without having to move the entire file around. This should work well in document imaging environments where image viewers try to conserve bandwidth by downloading only portions of files.
Data Director from Qstar (Fort Walton Beach, FL) is less a jukebox management system than it is a full-bore storage management system. Not only does it manage jukeboxes, it will also manage RAID storage, magneto-optical and tape. Qstar is a modular system. Support for each of these different types of storage is built into separate applications. It gives you a central storage management system at the center with separate device controllers for each kind of storage. This helps to avoid application “bloat” where one system tries to do everything. In environments where users only use one particular type of mass storage, this modular approach saves money and improves reliability. It is likely that more vendors will chose this architecture as they add device support. —L.R.
