A Better Way to Access LAN-Based CD-ROMs

Rainer Mauth

CDserve Nexus Class works independently of any network file servers, lets a maximum of 255 concurrent users access up to 150 CD- or DVD-ROMs, and enables multimedia information to be retrieved across a LAN at speeds of up to 10 times faster than state-of-the-art CD-ROM towers.

Although CD-ROM drives' transfer rates have steadily increased, these speed improvements are of little benefit in shared-access applications. The reason is that access times of today's CD-ROM drives in the range of about 150 ms slow down concurrent use. CDserve avoids this drawback by storing and compressing an image of each CD-ROM on high-capacity Ultra-SCSI hard drives. In addition, CDserve's Direct Network Attach architecture us es your LAN's bandwidth more effic iently than file-server-based systems. When a network user requests access to the device, it decompresses data on the fly and transfers it at an average transfer rate of about 6 MBps -- independently of the number of concurrent users.

You can install CDserve Nexus Class devices in a network without a conventional network file server. All you need on the workstations are a network card and a protocol stack that includes an IPX, TCP/IP, or NetBIOS interface and an additional CDserve CD-ROM driver. The systems work with all versions of Novell NetWare, Windows 95, LAN Manager, Lantastic, and Windows NT NOSes.

The high-end CDserve Nexus Class series supports storage capacities of up to 90 GB. If you don't need the high capacities, DVD support, and performance of Ultra-SCSI and PCI technology, you can get a less expensive CDserve 10 system.

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Where to Find

CDserve Nexus Cl
ass.........................Starts at £3995 for Nexus Class series


......................................................£1995 for CDserve 10

Contact:  Avantis, Luton, U.K.
Phone:    +44 1582 490092
Fax:      +44 1582 490046
Internet: 
http://www.avantis.co.uk

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CDserve Nexus Class

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