CentreStack transforms traditional file servers into cloud file servers

OpenStack Swift is a good fit for private enterprise storage and enterprise file sync and share solution (EFSS). This video demonstrates using a Mac client to access files and folders in the file sync and share solution, while the back end storage coming from OpenStack Swift.   visit www.gladinet.com and follow the Enterprise or Service Provider link for more information.

EFSS is about file sync and share. Sync is about move files from point to point so it can be shared later. File sharing is about collaboration. OpenStack Swift can be the backend storage service where the files stay. The Gladinet Cloud Enterprise is the user-facing front end providing the sync and share capability. In sharing and collaboration, one of the most required feature is permission control, meaning who can access what files and folders. This video demonstrates OpenStack EFSS solution with file permission control. Team Folder Team folder is like network share, in that you can assign read/write permission to different people. Folder Permission Folder permission is like ACL (Access Control List), that you can assign list/read/write/delete permission to individual folders.   For more details, visit http://www.gladinet.com and follow the Enterprise or Service Provider links.

This session covers the OpenStack File Sync and Share solution. The storage service is provided by OpenStack Swift. The File Sync and Share Layer is provided by Gladinet Cloud Enterprise. In the video, it started by connecting the OpenStack Swift container to user’s home directory, and then upload some files to the cloud folders. After that, it demonstrates the file and folder sharing from web browser interface, windows client interface and from mobile client interface.

In today’s session, we will demonstrate the Windows client for the Enterprise Sync and Share solution based on OpenStack Swift. The windows client has two main features. One is the virtual drive in the Windows Explorer. The other is the ability to synchronize an existing local folder with OpenStack Swift containers. Check out the video below.

The previous two sessions covers the OpenStack Swift based EFSS (Enterprise File Sync and Share) solution without the Active Directory integration. This video shows the same EFSS solution based on OpenStack Swift and Active Directory, together with a single-tenant Enterprise Edition of Gladinet Cloud Enterprise. Users from active directory has their home directories from OpenStack Swift containers and can access the files over web browser and desktop clients.

We kicked off a series of OpenStack EFSS video demo and blog articles. Yesterday we started with a general overview of the EFSS (Enterprise Sync and Share) solution based on OpenStack Swift. Today’s session will focus more on the web browser interface. This video starts from the multi-tenant interface and going into creating a new tenant, and assign an OpenStack swift container to the tenant. After that, it covers the multi-user web browser interface about how each user access the files and folders. (Single Tenant Enterprise Edition is a special case of the Multi-Tenant edition) In the middle of the session, it reviews the team folder concept and how multiple users in the same company can share and collaboration on the team folder. At the end of the session, it also covers the peer-to-peer or point-to-point share. The peer to peer share can share files with guest users or users from other companies.

OpenStack Swift is for the private cloud, from the CPU to object storage. Enterprise file sync and share focused more on the private cloud, which makes it a natural fit to play together with OpenStack Swift. This video demonstrates the Gladinet Cloud Enterprise (providing the EFSS, enterpriser file sync share layer) running side-by-side with OpenStack swift (running on a Ubuntu server). Together they can provide a private cloud based, enterprise file sync and share solution.

Gladinet Cloud android client over the years has accumulated many features such as thumbnail for pictures, offline browsing, upload multiple pictures, in-place editing of files and etc. The video below documents the new look and feel since November this year.

iOS 7/8 changed to the new crisp icon style. The Gladinet Cloud iPhone/iPad client also get a new set of crisp folder icons to match the new iOS 7/8 style.  Here is a short video documenting the new Gladinet iOS client. It shows the directory browsing, preview files, open files in native application, offline browsing and other features.  

The local editing feature is to use local application on Windows desktop and laptop to edit files sitting in the cloud directly without downloading and installing the full feature desktop client. The use case can be that you and your colleague are looking at some files together and you will need to make some modification and you are away from your desktop so you will need to make modifications without the full desktop client. Below is the video.

When Service Provider partners select Gladinet Cloud Enterprise to provide a cloud sync and share solution to their existing customers, most of the time they already provide other services to the customers, such as file server, web server and email servers.  They will need to have a way to integrate a new service to their existing service portfolio and have a need to do deep integration. Gladinet Cloud User Manager API is for this purpose. To further support the integration work, the PowerShell Module is provided as one of the ways to leverage the API integration. With the PowerShell module, many tasks such as create user, create tenants can be scripted. Below is a video session for the PowerShell module. It is a quick look into how the powershell module works. For more detail, contact Gladinet support for the API documentation and the PowerShell documentation.

Role Manager is about giving users certain rights and access to certain management functionality. Before the role manager, the Gladinet Cloud Enterprise has delegated administrator. The default tenant administrator can assign additional administrators to help out on the administration work. However, the delegated administrator is more a all-or-nothing in the past, meaning if you are the admin, you have all the right, and if you are not an administrator, you don’t have rights. Now, with role manager, you can have a finer control of what users can do regards administrative works. Below is a video session about the Role Manager.

Gladinet Cloud Enterprise in the past has been supporting the regular Microsoft Network Share. The use case is to give online access, mobile access and remote access to Microsoft network shares, over web browser, iOS and Android devices and from remote locations. The Microsoft DFS Share is a little bit different from the regular Microsoft Network Share in that it needs an additional step to translate the distributed file system share into a regular network share. This video documents the Gladinet Cloud Enterprise DFS Support.

There are two ways to upgrade Gladinet Cloud Enterprise. First one is by using the same installer and the installer will detect the existing installation and do an upgrade. This method is very easy and straight forward because it is about clicking one upgrade button and the rest of the upgrade work is done. There is also another script method of upgrading. While the installer way is good for small setup, the script way may be good for big deployment. The following 5-minute video documents the installer upgrade.

Here is a 10-minute video documents the cluster administration, tenant administration and the normal user’s file and folder view in the web portal.

Gladinet Cloud Enterprise continues to add enhancements.  Here is a quick summary of recent features added. (1) Support for Windows DFS as backend storage. In the past we support Windows network shares. Now we support DFS shares. (2) Storage Reports, File Reports and Usage Reports. (3) Scalability Enhancements on Gladinet Cloud Enterprise Worker Nodes. (4) Local Editor Features to merge web portal experience with local editor experience. Pretty soon we will be releasing video about recent enhancements. Stay tuned!

Starting Gladinet Cloud Enterprise build 719, there is document preview feature for the web browser interface. The following video shows the document preview feature inside web browser.

The Gladinet Cloud Enterprise is getting easier to setup and getting easier to upgrade and maintain. This video shows how easy it is to upgrade Gladinet Cloud Enterprise. From begin to finish, it only takes 5 minutes and after that, the Gladinet Cloud Enterprise is upgraded.

Gladinet Cloud web portal has a new look in the upcoming release this weekend. The goal is to make it more touch friendly and close to the touch artworks. The design is to make it simpler and at the same time more elegant. Here is the video:

Gladinet Cloud Enterprise is a private sync and share solution that you can self-host on premise or inside a data center you choose. In this video, you will see Gladinet Cloud Enterprise installs inside Artisan Infrastructure in a Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine and connects to Artisan Infrastructure’s Object Storage (OBS). As a result, Artisan Infrastructure virtual data center and Gladinet Cloud Enterprise work closely to have a private sync and share solution.

The following video shows how to setup a service template inside HP CloudSystem Matrix with basic Windows Server 2008 R2. After that, we can start the virtual machine and install the Gladinet Cloud Enterprise in the HP CloudSystem Matrix. The end game is an enterprise private sync and share solution running inside the CloudSystem Matrix/Virtual Machine/Virtual Network environment.

We are seeing more and more Enterprises deploying OpenStack Swift as an enterprise wide object storage platform. After that, they are looking for a sync and share solution that they can self-host and self-deploy, side by side with their OpenStack Swift solution. This article documents a quick and easy setup of Gladinet Cloud Enterprise as the enterprise sync and share solution on top of OpenStack Swift. Step 1: OpenStack Swift as the Storage Layer First the enterprise need to have a storage layer. Most likely they will use OpenStack Swift. It can start with a simple 4-nodes or 6-nodes setup and scale to bigger size later on. The OpenStack Swift can have either private API access or public API access. Either one is fine. Step 2: Install Gladinet Cloud Enterprise The second step will be install Gladinet Cloud Enterprise, where the Gladinet Cloud Enterprise servers can access the OpenStack Swift via API access.   For more information, please visit the Gladinet OpenStack Swift...

Gladinet Cloud Enterprise is built on top of Microsoft Web Platform, including Windows Server, Internet Information Server, .NET Framework, SQL Server (and Express) and ASP.NET. This makes it very straight forward to install on Windows Server 2012. This video documents how to get it installed on Amazon AMI Server 2012. It is very straight forward. It all started with picking the clean OS image to start with: Windows_Server-2012-RTM-English-64Bit-Base-2014.02.12 - ami-814642e8 Microsoft Windows Server 2012 RTM 64-bit Locale English Base AMI provided by Amazon Here you go, the video …

Gladinet Cloud Enterprise has two package options, one is for single enterprise, and the other is for multi-tenant service provider. In the following two video, you can take a closer look at both options. First Let’s take a look at the Service Provider Service Provider Option Enterprise Option

It is about 50 days into the new year and there are already many changes in Gladinet products and solutions. Here are some of the most important ones. Mobile Client Enhancements iOS client added many features, such as multiple file upload, thumbnail viewing for directory listing. Added token support for security. Android client added many features as well, such as multiple file upload, offline support, and token for security. Large Active Directory Support In January, we simulated an internal active directory forest that covers 3 sub-domains, containing over 300,000 users.  This is largely driven by our enterprise partners. As a result, Gladinet Cloud Enterprise supports very large active directory integration. Better OpenStack Swift Support This is also driven by our partner as more and more are taking on OpenStack Swift as an internal private deployment. Gladinet Cloud Enterprise has been tested against OpenStack Swift again and again, first with Rackspace Cloud Files, the...

As Gladinet Cloud Enterprise got adopted more and more into Enterprise, we have seen bigger and bigger Active Directory setups that we need to support. The following video demonstrates multi-domain AD forest support. The goal is to support big multi-national corporations with multiple Active Directories and with 200K+ users.

Happy new year, everyone! There are exciting features coming to Gladinet. To start it off, we went through the User Interface first and now there are multiple themes in Gladinet Cloud. Here is a YouTube video that takes you through the various User Interface components.