CentreStack transforms traditional file servers into cloud file servers

OpenStack Object Storage is cloud storage services created by open source software. For service providers that need a cloud storage service built on commodity hardware and open source software, OpenStack could be an option. One of cloud storage’s primary use case is backup. If you are deploying OpenStack, very likely your first batch of customers will be looking for backup solutions that can take customer’s local data and backup to OpenStack. Gladinet has a suite of products for backing up to OpenStack cloud storage. Before we introduces the suite of products, first review the different backup use cases.

What is your #1 used application on a daily basis? It is probably email and the answer could be universal. What is your #2 used application on a daily basis? It is likely to be Office related applications but the answer could be different based on your job functionality. If you have moved your #1 app and #2 app to the cloud, what is next? Probably your file server and you are looking for cloud storage. Sounds interesting? read on …

As I was explaining Gladinet CloudAFS to a group of IT people as a file server with cloud storage attached, one question I got was:     How much bandwidth you need to run file server with cloud storage? It is very obvious where the concern is coming from. If I had an on-premise file server, with cloud storage attached as tier 2 storage, will the slowness of the Internet (as compared to LAN) slow down the file server activities? Rest assured, Gladinet CloudAFS takes care of this. Specifically, it takes care of two issues. A. Slow Internet to the Cloud Storage – that is why it is tier2 storage. B. There is a glitch, Internet is down. The secret to both maintain local LAN performance and leverage Cloud Storage is to have a tier 1 storage locally on the hard drive (or NAS or SAN). When people read and write to the file server, it is writing to and reading from the tier 1 storage, thus gives you an impression of local storage because it is indeed local storage. Gladi...

It is still early for the cloud-related market. However, cloud related topics are buzzing around and that make people wonder: what exactly is it so exciting? For example, today there is a WSJ article titled “ Google Goes to the Cloud for New Idea in PC System ” that talks about Chrome OS on a laptop. Is this all cloud computing is about or is this just a small piece of it? 3 big use cases about cloud computing To understand the current cloud computing movements, first we need to understand the 3 big categories: 1. Storage – online storage, storage from the web or just “Cloud Storage”. More specifically, it refers to Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, Windows Azure, EMC Atmos, Mezeo, Scality, Nirvanix and a bunch of other companies providing infrastructures that allowing scalable storage to be delivered across the Internet. 2. Application – online applications or web applications More specifically, it refers to applications such as GMail, Salesforce.com, Google Docs, Ever...

Today we got calls from two different customers, all asking about the Google Docs for your file server use case. I thought it is interesting to  have different customers asking the same thing. It could be a popular use case to write about. Both customers are small companies with 5-10 people. Neither wants to maintain an in house server and one even with mobile workers. Both are on Gmail as their email infrastructure. They wanted to use Google Docs to share documents but they don’t want the clumsy web interface to slow down the upload/download process. In another word, they like the ability to share with employees from Google Docs but need direct desktop access for file transfer. As long as Google Docs can serve and share folders and files and integrated into Windows Explorer for drag and drop, it fulfills the file server role as they desire. This is a very good use case for Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

Every SQL Server admin knows how to backup SQL Server. It is a very mature technology since SQL Server 2005 because it has built-in support for Volume Shadow Copy Service. It knows how to take a consistent snapshot of the database and produce the snapshot as files for backup applications to consume and store. With Gladinet Cloud Backup , SQL Server Backup to Amazon S3 or any other supported Cloud Storage Services such as Windows Azure or Open Stack is as easy as set-it-and-forget-it, while restore is as simple as point and click. (check Gladinet’s homepage for supported cloud storage services) Get Cloud Backup You can have cloud backup in two different ways. The first one is a standalone installer package. The second one is an optional add-on for Gladinet Cloud Desktop. This tutorial will use Gladinet Cloud Desktop add-on for illustration purpose.

Year 2010 was a busy year for cloud storage. The buzz reached a whole new level when you saw companies like Microsoft, Google and EMC announcing new service offerings around cloud storage. Event Calendar Date Summary February 1, 2010 Windows Azure out of beta, starts billing. Finally ready for customers. February 8, 2010 Amazon S3 introduce versioning support March 9, 2010 Amazon S3 stores over 1000 billion objects March 24, 2010 Gladinet Cloud Desktop reached 2.0 April 12, 2010 Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 released. Windows Azure support is built-in. April 27, 2010 Gladinet introduced CloudAFS - gateway to cloud storage. May 10, 2010 ...

You are the IT admin of a 50-student team and you are thinking of providing cloud storage for each of the 50 students. Each will have around 10G cloud storage space. Each will have both home access and on-premise access to the storage. This is a typical use case for students in your department looking for places to store their project files and term papers. Why Cloud Storage? As the admin, you are looking for a low cost solution without the burden of maintenance. For 10G, the cost is around $1.5 per month per person for storage and some more for bandwidth. The cost is pretty low compares to someone has to maintain an in-house file server. Why Amazon S3 When it comes to cloud storage,  Amazon S3 is the leader in this category in 2010. It has been in the market for the longest and has the biggest deployment. Gateway to S3 Cloud gateway can mean different things to different people.

As quoted from the OpenStack web site: OpenStack Object Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of accessible data. To summarize in a different way, it is open source software to build cloud storage on cheap commodity PCs . Sounds like a pretty good deal? Certainly it looks attractive to service providers looking to enter the cloud storage market. If you are building an OpenStack cloud storage offering in your garage now, you will find Gladinet a great help to provide a gateway to your cloud storage once it is ready. Depending on what you need, you may use Gladinet Cloud Desktop , Gladinet CloudAFS or Gladinet Cloud Backup . You may need all of them as a cloud storage access suite.

When Google Storage for Developer came out, it came out with an Amazon S3 compatible API. There are also other service providers do the same thing. The logic was simple. If Amazon S3 is the leader, by providing an S3 compatible API, the cloud storage provider attracts existing S3 communities and existing S3 developers. Initial thought, it is a good move. But wait a second…

“ If I have Amazon S3 , do I still need Google Storage ?”, a customer asked us during a support call. The mind was drawing blank that moment, and after a few seconds, the answer was ‘no’ as it slipped off my tongue. That could be a typical moment when you were asked a question that you never thought about before and had to answer it quick. After the call, we had all the time to answer the question – If I have Amazon S3, do I still need Google Storage ? Coming back to the context of the call, the customer is a Google Apps user, with Google Docs . He was finding ways to work around the Google Apps 1G byte limit in the Google Docs. Apparently he likes Google Docs and wish he could put more into his Google Apps account. Finally, we told him, look, we have been waiting for the more storage from Google Docs (w/ Google Apps) too. There is Google Storage for Developer, priced similarly to the Google Apps storage,  which allows you to store 1T bytes.

AT&T Synaptic Storage is a cloud storage service.  There are many use cases that apply to cloud storage. For example, off-site backup and restore, collaboration and sharing, anywhere access and mobile workers are all among the most popular use cases for cloud storage. Synaptic Storage is no exception, supporting all these use cases. This week, we will start a series of quick start videos covering the Gladinet products and how they enable different access scenarios to AT&T Synaptic Storage. Cloud Desktop – Desktop access and remote admin use case. CloudAFS – File server access for a group of users. Cloud Backup – Backup services for servers and workstations. Below is the quick start video for AT&T Synaptic storage. ( click this link for HD format )

Your SMB company spans several sites, each site has its own data storage solution like a NAS device. It is good initially but overtime, the remote site becomes data-silos that are disconnected and can’t be shared across company easily. The longer the data has to stay local to the remote sites, the harder it is later on to consolidate. The earlier you can leverage cloud storage to consolidate your remote sites’ data, the easier it is later on for access. Cloud Storage Cloud storage is good for consolidating data from different remote sites. You can have data hosted by Amazon S3 , Rackspace Cloud Files , Windows Azure Storage or AT&T Synaptic Storage and gain access from different remote sites. The Cloud Storage Service Providers will take care of the storage provisioning, replication and other tasks that you had to do previously on a  per-remote site basis.

Every Hosting Provider is building its own cloud storage solutions. The situation is either build it or lose business to whoever has it, such as Amazon S3 , Rackspace Cloud Files or Windows Azure Blob Storage . Now the question is how to build it fast and take it to market soon. In this sense, OpenStack Object Storage is very attractive. First it is open source. Second, it is based on Rackspace Cloud Files so it has big commercial companies supporting the initiative.   If you are a service provider built on OpenStack storage, you are thinking about how to deliver that storage to user’s desktop. If you are a SMB user, you are thinking about how to use the storage from your desktop too. Either way, you are looking for a Windows client that supports OpenStack storage. With the release of version 2.4, OpenStack is supported in Gladinet Cloud Desktop, CloudAFS and Cloud Backup, collectively the Gladinet Cloud Storage Access Suite.

If you have a Google Storage for Developers account (through invitation only), good for you because you can continue to use the 100GB free storage as long as Google Storage is still in preview mode. If you don’t have a Google Storage for Developers account already, you can sign up with billing information. You don’t get the 100GB free storage but you can use up to 1 Terabyte of storage as long as your billing info allows. It is now in this Preview/Production mixed mode. Before long, Google Storage may enter into the full production mode, competing with Amazon S3 for the cloud storage business. If you are new to the cloud storage, you may be looking for some review materials to decide which one you will use. This article will compare them from different aspects.

Yesterday I received a Google Storage for Developer Update email from the Google Storage Team. The Email Here is a quote from the email: Thank you for using Google Storage for Developers. We write today to make sure you're aware that we've changed our service. Increased Account Limits & Billing When we began the Google Storage for Developers preview, all accounts were free and limited to 100 GB of storage. Google Storage accounts can now access increased storage by providing credit card billing information. Additionally, for accounts with billing we provide a service level agreement (SLA). Find our published service level agreement at: https://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/sla.html . Accounts with billing can now use up to 1 Terabyte of storage by default. If you need more capacity, just let us know! Contact information is on our FAQ page: http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/faq.html . The Change Officially still in preview mode,  Google Storage starts to ...

When you have people working from home or visiting customers, you have a mobile worker. Traditional way of providing mobile worker support is through VPN, virtual private network, which is before we saw the Cloud Storage revolution. There are problems that VPN can’t solve. For example, if you are on the customer site, VPN back to corporation may be blocked. If you are at the airport, the WiFi at the airport may have certain ports blocked as well. With cloud storage, you now have another option for the mobile workers. Since cloud storage is off-premise by nature, it is easier to access when the worker is on the road. Cloud Storage on Desktop One of the solution is to attach Cloud Storage to mobile worker’s laptop. Gladinet Cloud Desktop is the solution for this. (1) It can map a network drive to cloud storage. Users can save documents directly to the network drive. (2) It can setup a synchronized local folder. Contents saved to the local folder will be synchronized to cloud storag...

As usual, when the support of a new cloud storage service provider is added to the Gladinet platform, we will do basic speed test against supported service providers to see how they compare to each other. This time we will compare Rackspace Cloud Files with Amazon S3 and Windows Azure Blob Storage. The Test Gladinet Cloud Desktop is used for the test. Cloud Files, Amazon S3 and Azure storage accounts are mounted into Windows Explorer as virtual folders.

With the release of Gladinet Cloud Desktop version 2.4, Rackspace CloudFiles is now supported. With Gladinet Cloud Desktop, you can map a network drive to Rackspace CloudFiles and do drag and drop transfers. You can sync a local folder’s content to Rackspace CloudFiles. You can also enable CDN for the container so the files you transferred up to CloudFiles can be integrated to CDN services. Step 1 – Mount the CloudFiles Account   Now CloudFiles is in Windows Explorer.

Gladinet Cloud Access Suite now reached version 2.4.  New Service Providers Supported This release adds support for Rackspace CloudFiles , OpenStack Object Storage , CAStor Storage and Google Apps Premier. This adds to the long list of cloud storage service providers that the Gladinet Platform supports. Amazon S3 AT&T Synaptic Storage Box.net Caringo CAStor EMC Atmos FTP File Server Share Google Docs Google Storage Mezeo Nirvanix OpenStack Peer1 CloudOne Rackspace CloudFiles Windows Live SkyDrive Windows Azure Blob Storage WebDav New Package Bundle Partners and customers are guiding us on the need of different access scenarios to support. As a result, Gladinet Cloud Desktop installation now has Cloud Backup available as a separate add-on. It is easier to manage for customers and partners that need both products on a single PC. Version 2.4 also marks the first time the simultaneous relea...

When you have a 6-person branch office or a 8-person sales team, you have a need to share documents with everyone and you don’t have a big budget for on-site IT department. This is when cloud storage comes in handy. There are multiple ways to share documents. Try Google Docs First of all, you can use Google Docs. Google Docs is both an online application and cloud storage. It enables everyone to share and edit documents online at http://docs.google.com . It will be convenient if the rest of the company infrastructure is on Google, such as Gmail for email service. There is a tight integration between Google Docs and Gmail. What if the company email infrastructure is with a different service and everyone else is using Microsoft Office and Outlook? In this case, you can use Gladinet Cloud Desktop to mount Google Docs as a virtual drive so you can conveniently transform files back and forth between desktop and Google Docs. Shared Virtual Drive The second way to share documents...

Storage Newsletter published a recent article, “We Want Simple NAS for Replication Only” . The author, Jean-Jacques Maleval, discounts existing NAS solutions for lack of simplicity and then states, “We just wish a simple, affordable and secure product to have our data regularly copied outside on a NAS connected to Ethernet…” He continues to suggest a reciprocal arrangement where companies A and B each serve as an offsite backup location for the other’s NAS. The article lists several requirements:

Cloud Storage has many benefits, one of them being Content Delivery. By nature, objects inside cloud storage have URLs. With URLs, it is easy to integrate these objects with Content Delivery Network and deliver the objects to edge locations around the world. We kicked start the Cloud Storage Strategy Series of articles last week covering the disaster recovery. This article will discuss another cloud storage use case about content delivery. The big 3 in the cloud storage services could be Amazon S3 , Rackspace CloudFiles and Windows Azure Storage . They all support integration with Content Delivery.  Below are sample lists of Amazon CloudFront and Azure CDN edge locations. Rackspace partners with Limelight Network, which has many edge locations too.

When you hear of Windows Azure Storage , you may be thinking it is a developer’s storage. First of all, you may see it in action from Visual Studio 2010. Second, you may be hearing it together with a geeky term – Azure Blob Storage. Since you are not a developer, you dismiss it and walk on. Now wait a second; clear your mind;  picture Windows Azure Storage as an external drive, offsite hosted by Microsoft, with drag and drop integration from Windows Explorer, would you still ignore? After all, Windows Azure Storage is just one of the many cloud storage, such as Amazon S3, Google Storage for Developer, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Rackspace CloudFiles and so on. As soon as the Windows Azure Storage can be integrated to your desktop, you can put it to use with familiar Windows user experience.

Cloud Storage is a natural fit for Disaster recovery. It could also be the most prominent use case for cloud storage because the storage is offsite and faster than tape.  Step 1 – Find a Cloud Storage Provider Many will pick either Amazon S3 or Rackspace CloudFiles . These two are the biggest 2 cloud storage service providers. However, we see many more options starting this year. For example, Windows Azure started in January. Google Storage announced around May. EMC World announced the EMC Atmos . At the end of the year, almost all major MSPs will have cloud storage offering. This article discussed in more details on how to pick a cloud storage service .

As the CIO, you have been thinking about Cloud Storage for sometime. How to best leverage the capability and cut cost? How to plan for the long term with integration and migration? There are many questions to answer. This article will discuss several repeating patterns from our customers . (1) What problem the cloud storage solves for you? 1.a Offsite Backup and Disaster Recovery Cloud storage is excellent for backup since it is offsite storage by nature. 1.b Integration with Content Delivery Network You have documents and media files that you need to push to the edge of the world for your customer. Cloud Storage is very good with the integration with CDN services. 1.c Sharing Documents with Customers. You don’t like to pass documents back and forth in email attachments with customers. You need a central repository that you can share. 1.d Sharing Documents between Your Remote Sites. Overtime, you remote sites accumulated storage silos that you can’t share with other...

Google Docs is a very comprehensive online office suite and collaboration tools. It is feature rich but it is browser only, meaning you will have to operate it from within a web browser. It is good that it is browser only so you don’t have to install any software. It is bad that it is browser only because it can’t interoperate with locally installed application. Nor can it interoperate with other cloud-based storage solution such as SkyDrive, Amazon S3 either. Several Use Cases for a Desktop Client (1) A local word document, local PDF document, how to send them to Google Docs easily (2) Google Docs only documents, how to back them up to local so they can be archived or edited using local applications. (3) Many local documents, how to migrate to Google Docs. (4) How to leverage both Google Docs and SkyDrive for same set of documents, for redundancy. Gladinet Cloud Desktop is designed for the above use cases.

If Cloud Storage is new to you, Cloud Storage Gateway is newer. Cloud storage could be a natural fit for disaster recovery and offsite backup. Cloud Storage Gateway or just Cloud Gateway can be the simple solution you are looking for to leverage different cloud storage services. As defined in wiki: A cloud storage gateway is a network appliance or server which resides at the customer premises and translates cloud storage APIs such as SOAP or REST to block-based storage protocols such as iSCSI or Fibre Channel or file-based interfaces such as NFS or CIFS. – wikipedia.org Old Tricks in a New Hat Since the primary job of a cloud gateway is translation of the newer REST protocol to the older file system protocol, it gives you a quick path to cloud storage without rewriting your on-premise applications. For example, you can use Gladinet CloudAFS (AKA Gladinet Cloud Gateway ) to quickly enable your existing file server with tier2 storage from many major cloud storage service ...

About a quarter ago, EMC announced that it will  no longer be supporting “production usage” of its Atmos Online cloud storage service. Instead, EMC encourage existing customers to move to its cloud storage service partners, such as AT&T Synaptic Storage, Peer 1 CloudOne and etc. That generated quite some publicity about the comes and goes of cloud storage services. What is Atmos? For curiosity , what exactly is EMC Atmos Online? To answer this, we must first introduce EMC Atmos.   EMC Atmos is a cloud storage product including both hardware and software. It is designed with scalability in mind for public cloud and big enterprise. It is an object storage with a UUID assigned to each object, while maintaining a HTTP REST interface to the underlying object storage. EMC Atmos Online was a cloud storage service built on top of Atmos. It first started as a developer/partner site for partners to develop solutions around the service offering. Later it went through a ...

The basic principle of growing the business is finding the best person to get the job done, with reasonable cost. That is why the payroll is outsourced to ADP; In-house Email Server replaced by Google Apps Premier; Business contacts are managed by Salesforce.com. Your in-house data storage will grow as your business grow. Over time, it will become expensive. For example, it may take a couple of days to backup 50G data to a FTP server. It will take 200 days to do the same thing for 5 Terabytes of data.  Your business premise usually is the slowest link to the Internet. It will not be a good idea to have local storage grow to a level that it is difficult to transfer to a different location over Internet.

Today we announced the ‘Home Directory’ support for Gladinet CloudAFS 2 , which works with major cloud storage services such as Amazon S3 , AT&T Synaptic Storage , EMC Atmos , Google Storage , Mezeo , Nirvanix , Peer1 and Windows Azure . The Gladinet development team is also working on the Rackspace CloudFiles , OpenStack ,  Caringo CAStor and other integration support. Pretty soon, these cloud storage services will be integrated to Gladinet Cloud Suite. What is a Home Directory? Before we talk about home directory, let’s talk about a shared directory first. It is fairly easy to understand a shared cloud storage directory. Everyone has a mapped drive to the CloudAFS server, the server in turn connects to cloud storage services and give you the same cloud storage to share. This was a default behavior in the first version of CloudAFS, a simple gateway to the cloud. Now CloudAFS 2 introduces home directory for each user. Driven by feedbacks from our partners, it is als...

Cloud storage market is inherently divided. If you are in US, you may be using Amazon S3. If you are an AT&T customer, you may be using Synaptic Storage. If you are in Germany, the privacy law may require data not leaving the country boundary. The country boundary, the MSP (Managed Service Provider) boundary and the geographic regions are all parameters that divide the cloud storage market up into pieces. When the market is divided, if a MSP moves quickly, it can capture good market share. This leaves each MSP scramble to beat the market with a cloud storage offering. But which cloud storage software to use? Which cloud storage API to conform to? Which way provides the quickest time-to-market? Here at Gladinet , we are seeing basically 4 groups of offering after doing many integrations with our partners to offer end-to-end cloud storage solutions to user’s desktop. Amazon S3 compatible API OpenStack, AKA, Rackspace Cloud Microsoft Azure EMC Atm...

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s Cloud Operating System. Just like DOS started with Disk (disk operating system), Windows Azure starts with Azure Storage.  Storage is the foundation of every OS. Wouldn’t it be cool that you can move your local folders and files into Windows Azure, and later you can use it for your Azure based applications? Step 1 - Sign Up The journey starts at the Microsoft Online Service customer portal , where you will authorize Microsoft to charge you based on your monthly Azure consumption, including the Azure Storage .

If Cloud is anything to do with resources from the Internet, FTP servers were much earlier than the cloud as we know now, defined by Amazon S3 , Rackspace CloudFiles, Windows Azure , AT&T Synaptic Storage and so on. If you are using a FTP server for offsite backup or content share already, what makes you want to jump ship to the *real cloud*?  Maybe it is because the 99.999999% durability and 99.99% availability from Amazon S3 is attractive, so you will never need to be concerned about FTP server crash, as the files are automatically replicated in the cloud. Maybe it is because it is pay as you go so you pay for 1G if you only use 1G instead of paying for the 100G FTP server without using its full capacity. Maybe it is because when the FTP server is almost full, it is another head ache to upgrade to a bigger server? But for cloud storage, it is never full, always ready to add more.

What is one Terabyte? It is 1024 GB or the same size as the hard drive comes with your Mid to High-end PC nowadays or a low-end PC comes tomorrow. What does it cost to store that on Amazon S3 ? It is $150 per month. It doesn’t sound like much, does it?

What are Amazon S3 buckets? They are containers full of storage objects. How can you access them? There is AWS (Amazon Web Service) Management Console Web Interface in a web browser. There are also many other Amazon S3 clients you can use to upload files into the buckets. Wouldn’t it be cool when you upload files by the AWS web console and the files show up on your Windows File Server; and vise versa? As an admin, you can remotely administer your Amazon S3 buckets over the AWS web interface, keeping the Amazon credentials to yourself. For the group of users that you are serving, they can share the Amazon S3 buckets by mapping a drive to the Windows file server, using their own Active Directory credentials.

As defined in Wiki, A cloud storage gateway is a network appliance or server which resides at the customer premises and translates cloud storage APIs such as SOAP or REST to block-based storage protocols such as iSCSI or Fibre Channel or file-based interfaces such as NFS or CIFS. – wikipedia.org Cloud Storage Gateway or just Cloud Gateway is a new product category. The main benefit is that it can bring cloud storage on-premise to where you work. When it comes to pick a cloud storage gateway, there are several questions to ask before you buy one.

Amazon S3 is the leading brand in cloud storage. With over 130 Billion objects stored, it is also battle tested to scale. It grows and gains trust from businesses around the world looking for offsite storage. If you are one such business, all that you need is an on-premise gateway to Amazon S3.

We opened up an Internet poll last week about which cloud storage do you use. The poll will continue to be open for vote at Gladinet blog . The early results are interesting. It looks like many readers are familiar with Google Docs and Microsoft Windows SkyDrive . Not surprising since both Google and Microsoft are big brand names. Both services are free. Both services were introduced long ago (Google Docs in 2006 and SkyDrive in 2007) It is interesting to see Amazon S3 has a big lead over the rest of the crowd, especially over Windows Azure Storage. It is possible that Windows Azure brand the whole cloud computing under Windows Azure, instead of brand individual components like the Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 and etc. People may be more familiar with Windows Azure as it is in Visual Studio 2010 and don’t actually think of Windows Azure Storage as a separate offering. When the mind don’t think of it as a separate offering, you don’t use it as a separate service.

Cloud Storage is cheap, typically around 15 cents/GB/month for 99% uptime and 99.9999% durability. What is cheaper? Local hard drive! You can get a 250G Western Digital drive for $69.99.  If you have to replace it every two years, it is 1 cents/GB/month.  Local hard drive is 10 times cheaper and many times faster. Well, I know, this is not a fair comparison. With cloud storage, you get offsite storage, you get anywhere access and you get unlimited storage provisioned right when you need it and the list can go on and on. However, this 10 to 1 cost ratio does bring up a valid argument – How to best leverage local hard drive to make the cloud storage solution even more useful, with almost no additional cost? When the cloud storage and local storage work in tandem, it brings out the best of both worlds.

When people trying to understand the buckets the first time, they think of them as top level folders. It is kind of right. You have your Amazon S3 account and the first level of objects you see are these top level containers – buckets. As Amazon S3 grows in popularity, we need to to take a closer look to the buckets and understand the functionality beyond the top level “folders”. Bucket name is part of the DNS domain name such as bucket.amazonaws.com. It has to be unique across all S3 buckets. It also resolves to the server that is hosting the bucket. For this reason, we recommend you create bucket names according to the DNS convention, such as person.department.companyname. For example, a bucket name dev.gladinet will become dev.gladinet.amazonaws.com as the DNS name, which can uniquely identify a development team shared bucket for gladinet. For this reason, the Amazon S3 support in the new Gladinet Cloud Desktop has been changed to bucket level support. You can mount an S3 bu...

  Support bucket mounting in Amazon S3 In this release, users can directly mount an Amazon S3 bucket. The advantages of mounting a bucket, instead of S3 as a whole include: Support for all Amazon regions, including US, US West, Europe and Asia Pacific. Can add files in the root of the mounted virtual directory, while Amazon S3 doesn't support files at the root level. Less buckets to manage in Amazon S3 Support Dunkel Cloud Storage. Dunkel is an Amazon S3 compatible cloud storage in Germany. Support Converted Google Apps accounts A new mount called Converted Google Apps Account is added. It can be used for those Google Apps accounts which have been converted to Google Docs. For more details about Converted Google Apps account, please read this article . Support Hebrew In Management Console Support different international characters in Management Console.

In the past when I felt that a document was important, I would email it to my Gmail account and label it with “important document”. After all, it has over 7G free space and growing. Now there are more choices. First is the Google Docs account can be used for storage. Second is the Google Storage for Developer. If you do a Google search for “Google Storage”, you can see these two options. Next I would need a desktop tool that can allow me to build a folder link between my local folder and my Google storage accounts. Gladinet Cloud Desktop would be fine to do so.

In the age of cloud computing, who are the early adopters? Is the desktop trending towards something simple like an iPad or a Chrome OS? Or is it trending towards Octa-Core/Windows 8/30’’ LCD super computing machine? Which kind of user benefits more from it, with cloud storage? In last week’s download.com statistics, 30% of the total Gladinet Cloud Desktop download were 64-bit downloads.  Overall 14% of the downloads are 64-bit.  Overall, 64-bit download from download.com is around 20% (such as winrar).  In general, 64-bit machines are better equipped than 32-bit machines. This means Gladinet software is installed on more powerful machines.

You may be a personal Google account user, with a standard gmail.com account. You may be a Google Apps account user, with a mycomany-domain.com account hosted by Google Apps. If you have a Google Apps email account such as joesmith@mycompany-domain.com but use a Google personal account service such as Google Picasa, who are you then? Our users have brought to our attention of a recent Google Apps change that attempts to grand unify the two sides together as one account. There isn’t much documentation on the Google web sites since it is still under the Trusted Tester program. All the documentation we found refers to the mysterious  “ Transition ”.  Now we are trying to piece together the “ Transition ” here.

  If cloud storage is like hard drive, people will use it like a hard drive. When I have a hard drive, I knew the free space is growing smaller and smaller. Eventually  it is full, crying for a bigger one. However, when it comes to cloud storage, you don’t see the smaller and smaller free space, you see more and more usage. Eventually you are wondering, how did I store so much in the cloud? This is exactly how I feel when I am looking at the audit trail of my AT&T synaptic storage consumption. Eventually the bill is the limiting factor of how much I put in to the cloud.

Offsite backup is like backing up to external drive. As long as the drive is there, people will use it to backup stuff. Some will do on-demand drag and drop of important documents. Some will go buy a $50 backup software to automate the process. Bigger companies may have more dedicate resources and software to handle it. You may found a backup software on the Seagate external hard drive you brought home. On the other hand, you may very rarely buy a copy of the backup software and found an external drive attached. Cloud Storage is like the external hard drive. As long as it is there and accessible, people will use it for backup purpose. Companies like Carbonite and Mozy specialized in online backup with online storage attached. These are the vertical players that bundles the desktop application, backup software and the online storage all together.

In the eyes of cloud storage service providers such as Google Storage, any On-Ramps tools, desktop clients, edge devices or appliance that can talk to Google Storage is a gateway. In the eyes of end users or IT admin, A cloud gateway refers to a central access point that does the translation of LAN based file protocol such as CIFS (Microsoft net share) to the cloud storage REST protocol.  As a non Google storage user, Google storage may refer to the Gmail storage, Google Docs storage . As a Google Storage user, the Google Storage may refers to the Google Storage for Developer (which announced at Google I/O this year). It doesn’t matter which definition you take, Gladinet got it all covered. The 3 products Gladinet Cloud Desktop , Gladinet CloudAFS and Gladinet Cloud Backup can build the bridge between local access and the remote storage from Google.

As a continued research of Cloud Storage speed test , this time the test is moved to EC2. From an EC2 instance, the Gladinet Cloud Desktop is installed. Both Amazon S3 and Google Storage for Developer are mounted as virtual directory in Windows Explorer. The same upload/download test is done to both storage to see how fast they can be.

There are many factors affecting cloud storage speed, such as the Internet pipe between you and the data center that is hosting the storage; how scalable the service provider is; how many user are using it at the same time and etc? We can do an upload/download test to see how fast you can upload data to the cloud storage and how fast you can retrieve the data back. In this experiment, we will test Amazon S3 , Windows Azure Storage , Google Storage for Developers , AT&T Synaptic Storage and Peer1 CloudOne storage.

Google has 3 different kind of storage. Google Storage as in the Google Picasa and Google Docs for a Gmail user. Google Storage as in the Google Apps. Google Storage for Developers as an Amazon S3 Competitor. You can access all three from the convenience of your desktop. Since Google Storage for Developers (GSD) is relatively new. This article will focus on the GSD. Once you are familiar with one, the other two will follow similar steps.

If C in the middle of ABCD is the Cloud Storage, it is surrounded by A, B and Ds to form a cloud storage solution suite. A is Access and Attach .  You need a solution to reach out to access cloud storage from local PC. You need a solution to attach and bring in cloud storage to your file server. You need AFS as in the Gladinet Cloud AFS to get the job done. It is a gateway solving the access and attach problem.

What are the most desired features for offsite backup to Windows Azure? Maybe Backup Exec with the ability to backup to Windows Azure Storage. For this purpose, you can use Gladinet CloudAFS as a CIFS gateway for Backup Exec. The combination is a high end solution. What is the most basic feature for offsite backup to Windows Azure? Maybe an ad-hoc or scheduled drag and drop from local documents to Windows Azure storage for a second copy? For this purpose, you can use Gladinet Cloud Desktop as a desktop tool. This is an entry level solution. Now we will talk about an offsite backup solution to Windows Azure storage that doesn’t require you to buy Backup Exec or do ad-hoc work. The solution will create full and incremental snapshots of local documents and save them to Windows Azure Storage. The solution can work with active documents through volume shadow copy services. The solution can work with SQL Server, Exchange Server and other system states. It is a turnkey offsite backup s...

SkyDrive is cool with 25G free online storage. It is like a virtual key drive to keep files handy without worrying where you have put the key chains. As long as you have your hotmail or MSN messenger credentials ready, you can get in and get out of SkyDrive easily. It is practical to store daily documents on SkyDrive for backup purpose. This article talks about a way to backup daily from local PC to SkyDrive.

Cloud Storage is a hot topic this year. Google I/O is talking about it with the introduction of Google Storage for Developers . EMC World is talking about the journey to the private cloud. HostingCon this year is almost completely dedicated to “the cloud”. You are fully aware of what it is by now. Have you tried it yourself? If you haven’t, here are several steps to jump in. If you have, jump in in the middle.

What is the easiest way to access Amazon S3 , Windows Azure Storage , EMC Atmos , Google Storage , or just the cloud storage as the inclusive term? As a home user, perhaps the easiest is a desktop client tool. Install the desktop client tool, putting in Amazon S3 access key and secret key, you can access Amazon S3 from Windows Explorer directly. For example, Gladinet Cloud Desktop is one such desktop application, connecting directly to the cloud storage. However, for an SMB with a small IT staff, the desktop client may not be the easiest, since it still require some installation and configuration work. The easiest could be a cloud storage solution that allows the end user access the cloud transparently, meaning they don’t even need to know that they are using cloud storage. This is when a Cloud Gateway comes in.

In this article earlier , we talked about Amazon S3 usage is picking up exponentially. This is a very good indicator of how people like and trust Amazon S3 for their online storage. This article will describe a practical method to access Amazon S3 , securely from your local PC. Gladinet has 3 products, Cloud Desktop , CloudAFS and Cloud Backup. The 3 products are all capable of encrypt file content before sending them off to Amazon S3. Today we will focus on the Gladinet Cloud Desktop. The User Interface is consistent through out the 3 products. Once you know one, you can use all of them.

Google Docs is an online application, with web-based word processor, spreadsheet editor and presentation tools. Google Docs is also an online storage. One of the unique differentiator is that it is very cheap at 25 cents per GB per year. It also supports all-file-type so you can store many different kind of documents to it. It also support non-conversion for documents so you can use it as a binary storage. You can also choose to convert documents to Google format, so you can enjoy the online features to edit and share documents. This is all good. Today’s article will talk about how to use Google Docs as a backup destination to keep a second copy of important local documents.

Amazon doesn’t break out the cloud service platform revenue in its quarterly reports. That leaves people wondering how big exactly is the Amazon cloud and how much money does it make? There are some information that is publicly available, such as the number of objects in Amazon S3 storage. As reported in March 2010, S3 has more than 102 billion objects. Earlier in this article , we extrapolating the data to estimate that S3 could have between 130-160 billion objects now and could pass 200 billion at the end of the year.

Hard drive is a commodity. Whether it is IDE, EIDE or SATA, you buy the right one and you can plug it directly into your computer. A commodity is a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. Commodities are substances that come out of the earth and maintain roughly a universal price Quote - Wikipedia Cloud Storage is becoming a commodity. The pricing is becoming similar with the interface becoming similar too across cloud storage vendors.

There are already quite some online backup solutions out there. Many of them are end-to-end solutions, including the front end UI on user’s desktop all the way to the backend storage. Solutions like Mozy or Carbonite has its own backend storage. Other solutions may resell Amazon S3 storage. There is also a segment of the market that doesn’t need end-to-end cloud backup solutions. For example, Backup Exec users that already have invested in a backup solution, why should they invest in another backup solution if they want to backup to the cloud?

A March 9 2010 report states that Amazon S3 had over 102 billion objects. I was searching on the Internet, trying to find the most recent report (Aug 2010). I didn’t find what I was looking for. However, I found reports on Amazon S3 data for different time spots from April 07 all the way to March 10, which will be good enough to see a trend and extrapolating to August 2010.

Synaptic Storage is the brand name for the cloud storage offered by AT&T. Synaptic is the parent brand that covers storage, hosting and virtual machines. Cloud Storage Synaptic Storage is similar to Amazon S3 , Windows Azure Storage and other cloud storage services. The storage usage is over the Internet, by HTTPS REST API and billed monthly by usage.

In a couple of years, Amazon and Azure in Cloud Platform and Services could be like Coke and Pepsi in soft drinks. With the launch of Amazon S3 in March 2006 and  Amazon EC2 in Aug 2006, Amazon publicized the “Cloud Services” early that it has a significant lead over its peers. On the other hand, we have seen time and time again how Microsoft take a lead from behind. It is not clear who will be the leader in a couple of years when Amazon has the leader role now. When you look at customers in a given product category, there seem to be two kinds of people. There are those who want to buy from the leader and there are those who don’t want to buy from the leader. A potential No.2 has to appeal to the latter group. Quote:The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing So what are the differences that Windows Azure has that appeal to the latter group?

  Windows Live SkyDrive is an online storage with 25G free storage. It also integrates web  version of the Office applications so you can edit documents directly from inside a browser and save to SkyDrive. However, people are still more used to Windows Desktop than browser when it comes to copying files. Windows Desktop still has more Office applications such as the wordpad, Microsoft Works and Microsoft Office. With Office 2010, you can save directly to SkyDrive. It is a good improvement. It will be even better if there is a direct native Windows Desktop integration to enhance the productivity of copying files back and forth between local hard drive and online SkyDrive account.

Windows Azure™ is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft® datacenters. - Quote Windows Azure Web Site How about the idea of outsourcing your IT’s expanding storage need to Microsoft? This article will talk about different stages you can start experience Azure storage bit by bit.

Looking for a way to backup your SQL server to the cloud? This article focuses on SQL 2005, but the same procedure will work for any version. With CloudAFS, you can now utilize cloud storage space and providers when executing SQL 2005 backup jobs. By attaching or “mounting” your cloud storage server, for example your Windows Skydrive account, to your file server using Cloud Attached File Server, or CloudAFS, you’re expanding the capacity of your server infrastructure at a fraction of the cost, and with no modification to your existing system. For IT professionals, because CloudAFS allows you to publish cloud storage as a network share, the product offers you a powerful advantage when it comes time to schedule and execute SQL 2005 backup jobs. This article will show you how to redirect SQL 2005 through CloudAFS so that your backups will be stored in the cloud, eliminating the risk of losing data due to a machine failure, or any number of other risks associated with storing or b...

Since when we got used to drag and drop documents for copying files? Windows 3.0? Now 20 years later, Windows apps turn into web apps and no drag and drop from Windows 7 to Google Docs ?   We know that HTML 5 is promising with drag and drop support some years later. Now, we will describe Gladinet Cloud Desktop ’s capability to turn Google Docs into a drive and support drag and drop upload/download.

This year, there are so many choices when it comes to pick a cloud storage vendor, such as Amazon S3 , Windows Azure , AT&T Synaptic Storage , Nirvanix , Peer1 CloudOne , EMC Atmos, Mezeo, Google Storage and etc. If you are seriously thinking about expanding your IT infrastructure with Cloud Storage Services, who do you pick and what are the factors to consider?

Windows Live SkyDrive offers a hosted 25G storage service for storing files in the cloud. It offers a browser based UI for you to upload/download files. It offers office web app integration. it also offers saving documents directly from Office 2010. Gladinet , a software vendor, has a solution called Gladinet Cloud Desktop that makes it easy to sync to SkyDrive from Windows Explorer. In fact, Gladinet Cloud Desktop turns Windows Explorer into a cloud storage portal that can easily sync to SkyDrive from other storage services or upload files from your desktop to any storage service you choose. Gladinet achieves this through a complete SkyDrive integration with your file system.

If you can write code against Amazon S3 API and customize your app to be Amazon S3 ready, it is great! Otherwise you need an easier way to access Amazon S3. Gladinet Cloud Access solutions make it easy to manage files in Amazon S3 ! If you need direct desktop access to your Amazon S3 account, use Gladinet Cloud Desktop . If you need centralized Cloud Gateway access without desktop client installation, use Gladinet CloudAFS . If you need an Amazon S3-based online backup solution for folders, Outlook emails or SQL Server, use Gladinet Cloud Backup . 

With the recent introduction of CloudAFS, Cloud Backup and Cloud Space products, they joined the long standing Gladinet Cloud Desktop to form a Cloud Storage Access Solution. Cloud Storage is good but when people need it, they need it from the desktop and the file servers. Some would enjoy writing applications against the cloud storage API. Majority of the users still need a turnkey solution that they can point-and-click, drag-and-drop to use the cloud storage.

You have important files on your computer, sometimes they are in-use, sometimes not. What if there is a Windows Service running in the background, continue to monitor the folders and files and back them up offsite to Windows Azure Storage ? A month later, you may find yourself looking for old snapshots and happily found it on Windows Azure Blob Storage . The file could be outlook pst file, could be an open project file or could be a running SQL server data files. It could also be Windows System State, registry or other key system files. As long as you keep the computer running, you can log off and walk away and the backup service is still doing its work, helping you secure your important files to Windows Azure Storage? Introducing Gladinet Cloud Backup!

  Gladinet Cloud Backup is a Windows Based product and service. If you have x64 based system, you will need the 64-bit package. Otherwise you need the 32-bit package. The supported OS range from Windows XP/Vista/7 to Windows Server OS including 2003 and 2008.  

Gladinet just released a new product – Gladinet Cloud Backup . As the name suggest, it does one thing – backing up to the cloud. This is the 4th product/service from Gladinet.

Windows Azure Platform has been released since Feb 2010. Azure Blob Storage is part of the offering and it provides good online storage service. So how to easily copy data in and out of Azure Blob Storage ? How to do it securely with SSL and AES encryptions for your files? This article talks about how to setup a AES encrypted network drive to Windows Azure Blob Storage.

Amazon S3 API is simple and there is beauty in the simplicity. Google noticed and the Google Storage for Developers has almost same set of APIs. Eucalyptus has Amazon-S3 compatible API too. German based Dunkel Cloud Storage is in this group as well. Most recently, Mezeo announced availability of Mezeo Interoperability API , compatible with Amazon S3, Google Storage and Eucalyptus. So what is so valuable in the Amazon S3 API that it is becoming a standard?

Gladinet Cloud Space is a service that allows you to turn your PCs into a personal cloud and view the files from a browser portal. The service is available in the Gladinet Cloud Desktop 2.3 and above. Later on, it will be available from Gladinet CloudAFS as well. For now, let’s install Gladinet Cloud Desktop first.

Security is one of the major concerns of cloud storage users. Quite often it is one of the factor of whether or not to use a cloud storage and its related product. There are many benefits to backing up your data to Amazon S3 , but how can users be sure that hackers, service provider employees or anyone else can’t look at their files after they’re backed up online? If the files were encrypted, that will certainly make it a lot harder to compromise when the files are online. With the introduction of AES 256-bit encryption for files backed up to Amazon S3, Gladinet Cloud Desktop is tackling that concern head-on: The system simply encrypts users’ files locally before saving them on the servers in their encrypted form.

Windows Live has come a long way since first being announced, tested, and launched in 2005 as a way to extend the Windows user experience. With the advent and subsequent contagion of social media outlets and the Web user’s unquenchable desire to share stuff with friends and family, Windows revamped its Windows Live software again for the fourth time, hence the pseudo name Wave 4. The Windows Live Essential Wave 4 Beta version was released on July 25 th , 2010. There’s a lot of stir around the Web all over gadget and Windows blogs about the new features.

When we were in the habit of using external thumb drive, what is the best practice of keeping documents around? The best practice was that you always save to local folder such as My Documents. At the end of the day, sync the My documents folder  to the external thumb drive with a drag and drop, xcopy or a backup program. First of all, saving to local drive is always much faster than to a thumb drive. Second, keeping a copy on the thumb drive, you prevent accidental deletion of the local copy.  Now we are living with plenty of online storage services around. For example, Google Docs is one such popular service. With Gladinet Cloud Desktop ’s driving mapping capability, you can save documents on Google Docs as if it were an external thumb drive in the cloud.

First we know there is storage in Gmail. After we saw Google Docs, there is storage in Google Docs. If you are a Google Apps User, you will say there are storage in the Google Apps Gmail and Google Docs too. If you have attended the Google I/O event, you will say there is Google Storage for Developers too! Basically there are 3 kinds of Google Storage.

Windows Live SkyDrive is part of Microsoft’s Windows Live range of online services. SkyDrive is an online storage and sharing service that allows users to upload files to the online storage, then access them from a web browser. The service currently offers 25GB of free personal storage. However, to fill up the 25GB is not an easy task. There are several browser based ways to upload files.

Cloud in a loose sense may be used to describe just about anything to do with getting resources from the Internet. In this sense, AOL, FTP may be the first generation of the Cloud Services for the past two decades. In this article, we talk about cloud storage in a sense as something similar to what Amazon S3 is and might compete with Amazon S3 . Why Amazon S3? Because it is the earliest in its kind and sets the standard as the following: Pay-as-you-go storage, billed monthly by usage Provides single known public access point over HTTP/HTTPS REST based API Extremely simple design (buckets and blobs) > 99.999999999% durability and >99.99% availability in its Service Level Agreement Create a developer eco system

Cloud Computing is nice and it lowers the cost of IT ownership and allows companies to focus on their core competencies. Google Docs is a nice cloud computing solution, with integrated online storage and web applications, such as a browser based Word Processor, a Spreadsheet Editor and a Presentation Maker. With Google Docs as the company infrastructure, documents and spreadsheets can live in the cloud with better sharing capability and easier accessibility and less IT total cost of ownership. It is like an IT paradise island that every administrator and business owners would like to go. But wait, how to go there and come back? Where is the digital bridge to reach out to the promising land?

We are helping companies migrating their in house file management solutions to cloud-based Google Docs. We saw one clever way of migration from one of our customer and would like to share the story. The customer has around 100 employees, using an in house file server to share documents. The file server is quite old and can’t keep up with the increasing volume of files. They decided to migrate to Google Docs. The first big task for the admin was to migrate existing documents from the file server into Google Docs before switching everyone over to the new Google Docs-based solution. Migrating 100 users’ documents from a file server to Google Docs is not a  small task. Delegating the migration task to all the 100 users could be disturbing too since not all the users are expert level computer administrators. So how can one IT admin handle all the migration over a weekend?

If I have documents sitting in Google Docs, why do I need to back it up to a different online storage such as SkyDrive? Maybe because I need the peace of mind that I can access it the moment I need from either places. Or in some countries, access to one may be blocked. Or maybe some days, one may go down temporarily. Anyway, it is a good practice to back up documents to increase reliability and availability. This article will show you how to backup your Google Docs files on a daily basis to SkyDrive.

In the Gladinet Cloud Desktop 2.3 release, a new feature – Cloud Space was introduced. So what exactly is the Cloud Space . Cloud Space is a browser portal ( mycloud.gladinet.com ) that you can centrally access your files on your computers. Cloud Space is a service that turns all your PCs into the smallest possible Personal Cloud, with a default browser access interface and a set of APIs. It has a central access point - mycloud.gladinet.com. Once you login, you can access your files regardless of where your computer is. It supports iPad too! Visiting your PC’s file such as PDF file, Word documents from your iPad sounds cool?

I wish there is a desktop folder that is connected to both Google Docs and SkyDrive . Whenever there is new content in the folder, the new bits and pieces will be synced to both Google Docs and SkyDrive. It can be a backup folder with two destinations in Google Docs and SkyDrive. It can also be a online repository that is RAID 1 across Google Docs and SkyDrive. If one is down temporarily, you can still reach to your documents from the other. It is a Dropbox like functionality based on both Google Docs and SkyDrive. Sounds interesting? read on …

SkyDrive was a pure online storage with 25G free space, until the merge with Office Web Apps. Now you can edit Word document and Excel spreadsheet inside a web browser and save them directly into SkyDrive. It is a generic online storage with web-based application support. Google Docs was a pure web application play with web-based word processor and spreadsheet editor, until it introduced the all-file-type support. Now it becomes a generic online storage with web-based application support. People usually refer to it as “GDrive”. The two started differently. Now they seem to go in the same direction combining online storage and online applications. If you are looking for an online storage solution, which one will be the best for you?

Gladinet , a software vendor, has a solution called Gladinet Cloud Desktop that makes it easy to sync to MS Live Skydrive from Windows Explorer. In fact, Gladinet Cloud Desktop turns Windows Explorer into a cloud storage portal that can easily sync to Skydrive from other storage services or upload files from your desktop to any storage service you choose. Gladinet achieves this through a complete Windows Skydrive integration with your file system.

Have you ever asked any of the following questions? How can I get remote access to all the files on all my computers? How can my employees gain remote access to all the files they need when they are not in the office? Is there a file sharing solution that allows files to be shared from any desktop, server, or the cloud? Is there any way to avoid spending days uploading all my files to the cloud just so I can share them or access them remotely? Can I create a private cloud for all my local and cloud storage? Gladinet has introduced a new service called Gladinet Cloud Space which solves these problems and creates a file sharing platform by creating a private cloud.

Gladinet , a software vendor, has a solution called Gladinet Cloud Desktop that makes it easy to sync to Amazon S3 from Windows Explorer. In fact, Gladinet Cloud Desktop turns Windows Explorer into a cloud storage portal that can easily sync to Amazon S3 from other storage services or upload files from your desktop to any storage service you choose. Gladinet achieves this through a complete Amazon S3 integration with your file system.