Product Review
R-Quest's TCR-4000 Duplicator
By Mitchell Levine
Mathematics teachers perennially complain that students lack
statistics literacy. Here's some scary ones: an estimated 1
in 500 data centers will experience a critical hardware failure
serious enough to cause a severe “data disaster.” And
of that misfortunate .002 percent of commercial enterprises
whom will experience such a catastrophe, 29 percent will never
reopen. Schools must, of course, reopen, which changes the
economics of data loss, but the impact may even be greater.
How can a price be put on that information which represents
the basics of education? Grades, discipline, vital health information—what
would happen if a severe system crash erased all of this key
data?
R-Quest's TCR-4000 provides an industrial strength solution
priced right for the education vertical market. Using its RAIDCase
technology, it offers real time data mirroring that not only
protects against evils like human error, viruses, and software
corruption, it can even allow your system to continue operating
during a complete hard drive failure. That type of catastrophic
failure is rare in a typical education technology environment,
but, given the severe slashing of IT budgets in the current
fiscal crisis, how could any administrator responsibly deny
the efficacy of stopping a problem before it even began?
The TCR-4000 installed easily on our test system, and survived
all of our simulated “crash tests.” Although a
bit more expensive initially than some other solutions, the
versatility and power of this peripheral cannot be overstated.
Particularly valuable for the education market is the newly
added Mac networking capabilities provided for the TCR-4000's
system optimization; G-4, G-44, and G-5 users throughout the
New York City schools will be able take full advantage. For
more information: log on to www.r-quest.com.#