CentreStack transforms traditional file servers into cloud file servers

Windows Azure Blob Storage is one of the cloud storage service. When you have a Windows Azure Blob Storage account, there are many things you can do. You can map a network drive to it so for direct access from your desktop; you can backup files to it for off site access. Those were already available with Gladinet Cloud Suite 2.0. Today’s article will discuss another use case – leveraging Azure Blob Storage for file sync across multiple PCs. The idea is very simple, Windows Azure Storage is available anywhere you have an Internet access, you can use it as a facility and conduit to pass files back and forth between PCs. In Gladinet Cloud Desktop 3.0, this idea was put to practice and here are the steps to use it. First you will need to install Gladinet Cloud Desktop 3.0 and mount your Azure Blob Storage account.  

Two weeks ago, Gladinet Cloud Desktop 3.0 was released. It was well received by the Gladinet community as it was featured on lifehacker.com too. Today Gladinet Cloud Backup 3.0 is released. This will be a typical Gladinet Cloud Access Suite release cycle; the Cloud Desktop will be released first; two weeks later, the Cloud Backup release; and two more weeks, the CloudAFS release.

You have started using Google Docs and you liked it. Overtime you moved more and more documents into Google Docs and it is turned into one of you main document management site. Now you started to wonder the what ifs. What if the online account was compromised. What if you forgot the password and you can’t get your documents back. Now you decided you want to have a local backup of your Google Docs files. Sounds like you? The solution is pretty simple with Gladinet Cloud Desktop version 3.0 . Step 1 – Mount Google Docs and Local Disk Side By Side For the mounting of local disk, you can create a local folder first, such as c:\backupgdoc and mount it as a virtual folder.

This is part 3 of the 3-piece tutorial introducing the Gladinet Cloud Access Solutions to the Internap XIPCloud storage . Accelerated IP, or XIP™, is Internap’s solution to the weaknesses of Transport Control Protocol (TCP). Through XIP, enterprise web services and applications that rely on the TCP layer can improve their performance by up to 400%.  - Quote Internap.com XIPCloud means Internap’s cloud storage combined with accelerated IP. The first thing you see from the Internap cloud storage marketing materials is high performance, in addition to availability, security and open source. This tutorial covers how to backup files, folders and SQL Servers to Internap XIPCloud. Gladinet Cloud Backup First you will need to have a copy of Gladinet Cloud Backup. The Cloud Backup is also integrated into Gladinet Cloud Desktop and Gladinet CloudAFS. As long as you have a Cloud Backup license, you can use it from one of the three products.

Amazon S3 is getting more and more popular. 2 years ago it was only known to the developers community. However, because of its leadership position in the cloud storage category, it got viral and now many small business owners are knowing it and thinking about leveraging it for more productivity. One of the common use case is:    If I already have an Amazon S3 account, how do I set it up so I can sync a folder from PC1 to PC2 when the PCs can be on different places. Gladinet Cloud Desktop 3.0 comes with a file sync feature that allows you to sync over your existing cloud storage. This article shows how to set it up. Step 1 – Setup Amazon S3 First you will need to visit http://aws.amazon.com , set up your AWS (Amazon Web Service) account.

If you want to use cloud storage from your desktop, what are the primary use cases? In another word, what will be the most valuable applications for you, when you can have cloud storage directly on your desktop? Use Case 1 – A Cloud Storage Drive You want to use cloud storage from a virtual network drive with drag and drop capability and the ability to save directly from windows applications. Use Case 2 – Online Backup You want to backup files and folders, music and video to online cloud storage. Sometimes you want to do a mirror backup to mirror a local folder into cloud storage. Sometimes you want to do snapshot backup with different versions. Use Case 3 – Multiple PC File Sync With cloud storage as a conduit and repository, now you can synchronize your files and folders onto multiple PCs.

We released Gladinet Cloud Desktop 3.0 this morning. It is a pretty big milestone as version 3.0 typically marks the maturity of a piece of software. If version 1 were to test the market acceptance and start collecting feedback, and version 2 were the start of incorporating user feedback into the product, version 3.0 is completely driven by feedbacks from our customers, partners and user base. There are several new changes you will notice. The most noticeable one could be the changes in the usability and the new look and feel. However, the biggest feature is the addition of Cloud Sync Folder. New Gladinet Management Console There are 2 goals of the new Gladinet Management Console, as compared to what it was in version 2: Simpler Better Organized  

In a recent Amazon Web Services Blog titled '”Amazon s3 – Bigger and Busier Than Ever”, it documented Amazon S3’s amazing growth from 0 in 2006 to over 262 billion objects now. As we plot the same numbers on an Excel graph and apply an exponential trend line, it shows Amazon S3 grows almost exponentially. This graph is a living proof of the fast growing cloud storage market and Amazon S3 is leading the charge. If you are a small and medium sized business, you can leverage Amazon S3 to be more productive. Earlier, we published a case study from a real estate company, about how they leverage Amazon S3 to provide both on-premise and off-premise access to Amazon S3. Once the data is moved from a on-premise file server into the cloud, it greatly enhanced user’s productivity since they can access it easily and share easily.

Rackspace-led OpenStack open source cloud computing initiative hits its six-month milestone when the Internap XIPCloud launched last month, leveraging the open source cloud.  It is an interesting development as we have seen open source projects like Apache taking on Windows IIS and Linux taking on Windows in the past. At this stage of the cloud storage development, it feels like it is everyone-else taking on Amazon S3. For companies like Internap, it speeds up delivery of cloud storage to the market. For Rackspace, it gains a partner to fight against Amazon and a competitor too to share the OpenStack customers at the same time. The successful implementation of OpenStack at Internap would certainly encourage more OpenStack implementations to follow. One of the problems that OpenStack implementers facing is finding beta customers to try the OpenStack implementation with some kind of applications and some kind of tasks. You would need some kind of connectors to connect existing appl