Easy File Server Access to Rackspace Cloud Files

rackspacelogo3If 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 to a windows file server.
In this case, customer has already developed a custom application that works directly with Cloud Files to refine the pictures and a web form that can take pictures and upload them to a Rackspace Cloud Files account.  It works fine. However, the customer has other types of media files that may be modified by local Photoshop, which can then be uploaded directly to the Cloud Files account, bypassing the custom application or the web form upload.
Below is a reference implementation. Inside the company office, an instance of Gladinet CloudAFS is installed on a Windows 2008 server. The CloudAFS has a Rackspace Cloud File account mounted as a virtual directory, which is then published as \\fs\rackspace_share.
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The users and graphical designers in the company are accessing the \\fs\rackspace_share through network drive mapping. This way, for the users that want to upload pictures directly, they will use the network share published by the CloudAFS instance. For the users that wants to use the custom application, they can do that too. This way, the CloudAFS and the custom application are interoperable.
We can even throw Gladinet Cloud Desktop in the same picture here for mobile workers. The Gladinet Cloud Desktop can be installed on the user’s laptop and the user can upload files directly to Rackspace Cloud Files.
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Related Posts

Use Rackspace Cloud Files as a File Server
How to Map a Network Drive to Rackspace CloudFiles
How to connect to Rackspace Cloud Files UK

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