School Library Journal Product Review Of The SuperCD August 1st, 2001
School Library Journal
Test Drive: SuperCD Server By David McQuin -- 8/1/2002
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.
Author Information
David McQuin (
dmcqui1@isd77.k12.mn.us) is media and technology specialist at Mankato (MN) East High School. © August, 2002 School Library Journal.
Company background.
Axonix Corporation is a private corporation that has been delivering affordable IT solutions since 1983. Axonix pioneered SuperCD, the world’s first hard drive caching, network-attached appliance designed for sharing CD and DVD ROMs. The SuperView server is the company’s newest network appliance and is the world’s first integrated video server appliance that records, stores and delivers video content for anywhere, anytime learning.
Contact information. Douglas Kihm, Vice President at 800.866.9797 x 213 or dkihm@axonix.com AXONIX CORPORATION 800.866.9797 www.axonix.com