Before the new system was installed, the British Library had a number of legacy systems that it had assembled over a number of years. The towers were from different manufacturers, with different speeds and specifications, so there were performance, administration and reliability issues. The library was also using two CD-Jukeboxes whose performance was no longer up to required standards. The new system has multiple redundancy built in to each unit, hot-swap modular construction and a complete spare unit contained within the overall enclosure. Mark Davies, the British Library's Digital Media Development Manager, said that there had been a marked improvement on access to the CD-Rom titles and no reported problems from staff or the public due to service failure.
System administrators have several options to optimise performance for their applications.
Through hard disk caching the user does not have to wait for data from the CD itself. Data from any cached CD or DVD is available almost instantly, dramatically improving data access and transfer speeds. This feature has been found to be useful at the British Library because some CDs or DVDs are in much more demand than others, and the status feedback that DataCache provides allows managers to order more user licences of these titles to ensure sufficient availability. All these preferences are managed via an intuitive Web interface.