CentreStack transforms traditional file servers into cloud file servers

If you are a real estate company, you may have many pictures of real estate properties that you want to host on a web server. If you are a car dealership, you may have many pictures of cars that you want to host on a web server. Rackspace is a well trusted hosting company. With Rackspace Cloud Files, it is fairly straight forward to link your Cloud Files account with the CDN (Content Delivery Network) it supports. With CDN, your pictures of houses or cars can be pushed to edge points on the Internet around the country. So if you are hosting a lot of media files on a web server and wish to push your media files out to a CDN network, Rackspace is a good choice. This article discusses a customer case study that easily access the CDN network through the combination of Rackspace Cloud Files and Gladinet CloudAFS .  Rackspace Cloud Files is a kind of cloud storage that can be linked to CDN. Gladinet CloudAFS is a file server solution that can mount cloud storage as a tier 2 storage ...

Cloud storage and cloud computing are generating more and more interests now. By looking at the Google Trends graph of “ cloud storage ”, you can see the search volume is going up exponentially since 2008.  

When using Amazon S3 together with Gladinet Cloud Desktop , you can have a virtual drive and virtual folder mapped directly to your Amazon S3 account and bucket. It is very convenient for you to transfer files back and forth between your local PC and the remote online storage. This article talks about a security feature that help you protect some folders inside the Amazon S3 with encryption. First you will need to mount an Amazon S3 bucket into Gladinet. it will show up as a virtual folder inside Gladinet drive.

Two years ago, all the cloud storage companies we knew were all US companies. For example, Amazon S3 has 4 regions, US-East, US-West and EU. Rackspace was US only. Windows Azure was US only. These are all US companies. Now we are seeing these companies expanded globally. For example Amazon S3 has Japan and Singapore region now. Rackspace has Rackspace UK. In addition, we are seeing more US companies started to offer Cloud Storage Services, such as Internap XIPCloud, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Peer1 CloudOne and etc. More importantly we started to see non-US companies offering cloud storage services now. For example,

Cloud Computing is good. However, any outage like the one we saw from Amazon EC2 last week will be scary for any SMB that is 100% dependent on cloud computing. Granted that we are at the early stage of cloud computing so it is more likely to see outages. As technology matures, it will be less likely to get outages like that. For example, how often do you get an electricity outage? Well, we still live through the early stage of cloud computing, so what to prepare for a cloud outage? 1. Have a Backup Plan If you are using cloud storage as the primary source of your work, you need to have a backup plan. For example, if you are using Google Docs, Box.net or Amazon S3 as the primary business document management system, you can create backups to local PCs. This article discuss how to use Gladinet Cloud Desktop to backup cloud storage to local PC . The same technique can also be used to backup files from one cloud service provider to another cloud service provider.

Amazon Cloud Drive is a new online storage application unveiled by Amazon last month.  It provides users with 5 gigabytes of storage space by default, with further storage space costing one dollar per gigabyte per year. Compares to other online storage solutions such as Windows Live SkyDrive, Amazon Cloud Drive doesn’t have online office application integration.  So far Amazon Cloud Drive is a pure storage solution, with focus on storing music files that you can later stream back to your PC and handheld devices. Without online word or spread sheet applications to work on your files inside Amazon Cloud Drive? No problem, you can use locally installed Word or Excel and have easy desktop access to Amazon Cloud Drive . Gladinet Cloud Desktop integrates Amazon Cloud Drive into Windows Desktop with following features, which greatly enhances the usability for people that use both local applications (Word/Excel and etc.) and online storage such as Amazon Cloud Drive.

Peer1 CloudOne is an EMC Atmos based cloud storage service. It has been on the market for quite some time now. If you have file servers hosted by Peer1, using CloudOne to backup the servers makes a lot of sense. First you can signup with Peer1 CloudOne Cloud Storage at this link : Let’s say you want to backup folders and SQL Server on the file server to Peer1 CloudOne cloud storage, you can use Gladinet Cloud Backup to get it done.

When it comes to cloud storage, there are many standards out there in the market. For example, Amazon S3 is the leader and many are using S3 API to create a S3-clone service. Rackspace Cloud Files and OpenStack are trying to create its own standard by giving away the software to open source community. Microsoft has its own standard in Azure Storage, incorporating Table storage and SQL storage, in addition to blob storage.  There are also other technology heavy-weights that are trying to setup CDMI as the cloud computing standard. In this race, every party has a different edge. For example, Amazon is expanding S3 API to include support for IAM (Identity and Account Management) with its edge in offering the most maturing and most adopted services in its platform. OpenStack has an edge in Open Source, which potentially can be adopted by many organizations looking to have full control of their code base. Microsoft has an edge too because whatever it does, it owns a significant mark...

If you are the leader, you have supporters. If you have many supporters, your API becomes the standard many would like to use. Now Amazon S3 is the leader when it comes to cloud storage so its Amazon S3 API is widely used. There are many cloud storage players that have Amazon S3 compatible APIs. For example, Google Storage for Developers;  Eucalyptus/Walrus; Scality/Dunkel; Mezeo Compatibility API and etc.. Gladinet supports Amazon S3 compatible cloud storage with its suite of cloud storage access solutions, including Cloud Desktop , CloudAFS and Cloud Backup .

What is right about the “Dot Com” bubble? Yes, the Internet is everywhere now on every PC, every handheld and tablet. You can buy a lot of the things from Internet too, such as from Amazon.com, E*Trade.com, Netflix and so on. The thing that went wrong was the timing, it didn’t fully developed in 2001 but takes an extra 5-10 years for the Internet to be the Internet we know now. The other thing is that not every dot com idea turned into a long lasting idea. For example, we saw Internet grocery idea like Webvan came and go. Internet's growth and maturing is leading to another big thing – Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing is experiencing a similar growth pattern. Many cloud computing related companies have high valuation. A lot of the things analysts say will be right too. However, like Dot Com, it will not fully develop in year 2011. Instead, it will take an extra 5-10 years for Cloud Computing to fully develop and mature.

Windows Azure storage is getting more popular. In a quick Gladinet survey, for every 3 Amazon S3 users, there is 1 Windows Azure storage user now. This article will discuss ways to do snapshot backup to Windows Azure storage. With snapshot, everyday, you can have a snapshot of the folder content or the SQL server you want to backup. The snapshot could be a full snapshot or an incremental one. The snapshot backup feature is coming from the Gladinet Cloud Backup product. The Cloud Backup is also integrated into Cloud Desktop and CloudAFS as an add-on package. Basically you can use snapshot backup from any of the Gladinet products.

Backup cloud storage to local? YES! It may sounds like anti-trend but our customers started to ask for ways to backup cloud storage to low cost local server. The customers asking for this, are customers that adopted cloud storage and moved IT infrastructures to cloud storage. From a business continuity perspective,  they wish cloud storage availability with low cost local drive. These customers are steps ahead of others at current stage, when most of the users are still thinking about local to cloud backup. With Gladinet Cloud Desktop , backup cloud to local is as easy as a drag and drop. This article will use Amazon S3 as an example to backup to a local folder.

Amazon S3 has been on the market since 2006. It is an excellent cloud storage service, mostly for developers and independent software vendors (ISV) to integrate into their products and resell to end users. It was less known as a consumer product but getting more popular as an online storage solution, together with the ISV’s products. Amazon Cloud Drive is brand new, about 3 weeks old, a new entry into the market as a consumer product. It is an online storage and also an online music streaming service. It is also built on top of Amazon S3 itself. If you are an Amazon S3 customer and are also interested in the Amazon Cloud Drive, you may wish to see them work side by side so you can move folders and files back and forth. This article demonstrates both online storage services working side by side in Windows Explorer. You will need to get a copy of Gladinet Cloud Desktop first. After download and installation of the Cloud Desktop, the steps are pretty straight forward.