CD's, once inserted into one of the drives, are mirrored by the server onto the hard drive for faster access. Hybrid CDs are mounted as two separate images, allowing access to the CD regardless of the platform of the client machine. After the unit was installed into the tower and powered up, all that needed to be done was the assigning of an IP address using a Wintel interface from a LAN connected workstation. Once the IP was assigned it became available through the LAN via http control. The html interface is a bit slow to load, but is very well designed with full access to network configuration, drive setup and overall server maintenance, logging and archival settings.
CDs can be hot swapped and become available to the network seconds after the disk is inserted.
We have chosen to archive all the CDs in our collection for faster multiple user access although if it is so desired you may set the server to simply cache the data temporarily. At this writing we have not observed any appreciable network slowdown even though we are running on a meager 10Megabit LAN infrastructure. As access to the volumes increases there will undoubtedly be some congestion and some slowdown of network speeds, but given the nature and size of our facility that should not be an issue. In larger settings it would seem prudent to have a minimum 100Megabit infrastructure and multiple servers sharing a smaller number of CDs per server. The Axis E100 is also very expandable since we could continue swapping out CD-ROM drives with high capacity hard drives until we ran out of SCSI ID's.