CentreStack transforms traditional file servers into cloud file servers

There is a recent customer case. The initial lead comes in over the web form and read “I am looking for a solution to backup files using the GeoDrive to Synaptic Storage. Please contact me”. For those of you who are not familiar with the terms, Synaptic Storage is AT&T Synaptic Storage, based on EMC Atmos cloud storage service. GeoDrive is an EMC product that present EMC Atmos storage with a drive letter. After all, the customer is converted to a Gladinet Cloud user, satisfying his requirements, better than a GeoDrive can do. This document will discuss this use case. The customer has several file servers that are Windows 2008 R2. These are file servers serving network shares to the 30-40 employees in the office. Customer wants to backup files and folders from these file servers to the AT&T Synaptic Storage. The customer has an existing backup solution that is backing up to a co-location data center. The monthly bill for the backup was between $200-$300. By switching to AT...

This is the second part of the SoftLayer series of articles, documenting features from Gladinet products and services that allow you, as an end user to more easily use SoftLayer Object Storage , without the need to do any programming. Before we get into the more advanced Team Edition that includes PC client, Mac client, web browser interface, mobile client with file sharing and team collaboration features, this article stays with the stand-alone desktop client use case. In the last blog, it discussed drive mapping feature. When you have a network drive that is connected to SoftLayer Object Storage, you can do drag and drop and ad-hoc backup and data transfer.  Sometimes, you prefer to have a more organized way of backup local folders to the cloud, such as mirroring a local folder into SoftLayer Object Storage or have snapshots taken and store that into the cloud. As in the last blog, you will install the Gladinet Cloud Desktop as a stand-alone application. In the Gladinet Manag...

The BASIC layer, on one hand, refers to the basic end user needs when it comes to cloud storage. The BASIC layer, on the other hand, refers to the sum of B ackup, A ccess, S ync/ S hare, I dentity and C ontrolled C ollaboration. End user won’t use OpenStack Swift storage directly because the interface is too primitive (such as read/write/delete objects). With a BASIC layer stacked on top of the OpenStack Swift, the basic needs are met and now it is ready for end user to use. It means the BASIC layer helps to sell OpenStack Swift Object Storage. So What is in a BASIC Layer?

As quoted from Wiki, Middleware is computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. We have seen the evolution of cloud computing and cloud storage. In terms of cloud storage service, Amazon S3 pretty much defines what cloud storage is. All the cloud storage services now are very similar to Amazon S3, whether it is Windows Azure Blob, EMC Atmos , Google Cloud Storage or OpenStack Swift Object Storage. These services have several things in common. First they are file (object) based. Second, they provide a set of very primitive API over HTTP, such as read file, write file, delete file and that is pretty much it. In a strict sense, cloud storage services referred to these services that provide the most primitive read/write functionality and  solved the most important problem of redundancy and scalability. It is the platform layer.

Today HP moved its cloud services to public beta. Gladinet has been working closely with HP Cloud Service since private beta to provide product integration support. Gladinet is also announcing today the support of HP Cloud Storage service with the full Gladinet Suite of products. In the latest Gladinet Desktop Client, you will see the HP Cloud drop down, which allows you to attach your HP Cloud Storage account into Windows Explorer as a mapped network drive. At the next screen, you can enter the related HP Cloud account information.

EMC Atmos is used in many places now. It is used by well know service providers such as AT&T Synaptic Storage or Peer 1 CloudOne. As we learned from our customers recently, it can also be used by private enterprise to backup data from employee’s local C drive. The scenario is simple, there are many employees that need to do backup from their desktops. EMC Atmos becomes the center piece where the backup data goes to. Since it is cloud storage software-capable, it can be used from both inside the company and also from over the Internet. Who doesn’t want an easy backup solution like that, where the IT Admin of the company has full control of the data and all the backup data is contained in one Atmos instance? This article documents an easy setup of using Gladinet Cloud Desktop as the desktop backup solution connecting into the on-site EMC Atmos Storage.

It is 2 days to Christmas 2011. Wish every Gladinet user happy Christmas and a happy new year 2012. As usual, it is time to take a look back at the year 2011, review the Gladinet milestones and look forward to year 2012. The most significant milestone in 2011 was the mark of over 1 million Gladinet software downloads, with important milestones reached in other aspects of the business too. Product Development In February, Gladinet Cloud Desktop 3.0 was released, followed by Gladinet Cloud Backup 3.0 in March and Gladinet Cloud AFS 3.0 (Cloud Server) in June. This is a complete suite of access products that help users access cloud storage from desktops and file servers. Gladinet continues to strengthen the core competency of  on-ramp solutions to cloud storage, bridging the gap between local storage and cloud storage. If you have Microsoft Cloud Storage, Google Cloud Storage , Amazon S3 , Rackspace Cloud Files and so on, Gladinet is the most downloaded solution to help accessing ...

We have been running a ‘ Why You Use Cloud Storage ’ survey on Gladinet blog for several months. From the survey, we can get a glimpse into the solutions people are looking for when they use cloud storage. In the survey, there are 5 categories to choose from – Backup, Access, Sync, Integrate, Connect and Share. These 5 categories also represent what Gladinet Cloud software covers with its product suite – Gladinet Cloud Desktop, Gladinet Cloud Backup, Gladinet Cloud Server and Gladinet Cloud for Teams.

Google has been providing cloud storage under the name of Google Storage for Developers for over two years. Recently it was renamed to Google Cloud Storage and graduated from the Google Code Lab. There are many ways you can use the Google Cloud Storage. For example, you can use it to backup your files; use it as an external drive so you can drag and drop files to it. This article will go over these two use cases with Google Cloud Storage. We will use Gladinet Cloud Desktop for the demo purpose. The same use cases are covered by Gladinet Cloud Server and Gladinet Cloud for Teams too. Step 1 – Activate Google Cloud Storage If you have never used Google Cloud Storage before, the first step is to activate it for your Google Apps account or your GMail account. goto http://code.google.com/apis/storage/ , and click on the Activate Google Cloud Storage button.

This is the last video demo of a 3-piece series about the Gladinet Cloud use case. In the previous two blog posts, we covered ‘Anywhere Access with a Cloud Drive’ and ‘Share Files with the Gladinet Cloud’. This demo is about a set-it-and-forget-it off-site backup feature in the Gladinet Cloud. Same as the previous two YouTube videos, it is best to view the following video with 720p HD option and with full screen.

Today we had an online meeting session with a law firm. The use case is very common and typical. The owner has a desktop PC that has several folders on the desktop that he wants to move to the cloud. He has several goals in mind. Goal A : Share those folders with team members directly from desktop or from cloud. Goal B : Easier access to those folders, such as web access, anytime access and drive letter/local drive kind of access. Goal C : off-site backup of those folders.   Goal D : Team members have easy access to those folders, preferably with web access. This is a very common use case for a team environment, when everyone is roaming around, not necessarily in the same office. The team doesn’t want to maintain file server in the office, nor do they want any VPN kind of remote access solution. Welcome to the cloud computing era, when these goals are so naturally achieved by the cloud. With Gladinet Cloud for Teams, it is a feature called ‘ Attach Local Folder to the C...

We talked about cloud storage use case can be summarized as BASIC (Backup, Access, Sync & Share, Identity & Control). This article discuss how the BASIC cloud storage use case is served by Gladinet Cloud. First there is a quick introduction video that may present it better than the writing here. Quick Intro Video (The video is 1280x720 HD)

You may have several important folders on the windows server that you want to protect online. Also as part of the cloud adoption strategy, you need the near term protection turned into a long term cloud migration. With these goals, it makes sense to mirror these important folders into a cloud storage service such as Windows Azure Storage or Amazon S3. In the near term, it fulfills the off-site backup purpose. In the long run, you can migrate your storage to these cloud storage services since your data is there over time. This tutorial focuses on Windows Azure Storage and how to set it up so your folders are protected by Windows Azure. The steps are similar if you want to replace Windows Azure with Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files . The product that can get it done is Gladinet Cloud Backup . Gladinet Cloud Backup is packaged into two different products – the stand alone Cloud Backup or as an add-on to Gladinet Cloud Desktop. Cloud Backup is a Windows background service so it can m...

Rackspace Cloud Files include Rackspace Cloud Files US and Rackspace Cloud Files UK. It is an excellent choice for online backup purpose, especially when you are already using other Rackspace services. This article covers steps to backup local files and folders to Rackspace Cloud Files First you will need to acquire a Rackspace Cloud Files account. If you need a US account, you will sign up at  Rackspace Cloud Files US . If you need a UK account, you will sign up at Rackspace Cloud Files UK . After that, you can install Gladinet Cloud Desktop as a Desktop application to connect to your Rackspace Cloud Files account.  The connected Rackspace Cloud Files account will show up like a locally attached network drive, allowing you to do drag-n-drop copying files from Windows Explorer. Gladinet Cloud Desktop also includes scheduled backup features. As shown in the following mount virtual directory wizard, you can pick either Rackspace Cloud Files (default US) or Rackspace Cloud F...

You may have several important directories that you want to protect online. It would be nice if you can mirror these folders into a online storage service such as Amazon S3 . This tutorial shows the steps to set it up so your folders get protected by Amazon S3. You can use either Gladinet Cloud Desktop or Gladinet Cloud Backup . For the Gladinet Cloud Backup, not only you can protect your local directories, but also you can protect them with version control (snapshot) and the ability to roll back in time. This tutorial will focus on Gladinet Cloud Desktop for the mirror backup feature. When you are ready to try the snapshot backup, you can use the integrated Cloud Backup add-on in Gladinet Cloud Desktop (or use the stand-alone Cloud Backup package).

OpenStack Storage (Swift) is one of the cloud storage technology that you can deploy on your own. There are many use cases around cloud storage such as Backup, Access, Sync, Integration and Connectivity and Share (BASICS). Today we will cover a special use case of backup – version control with OpenStack Storage. Let’s say you have a local folder that has important documents. You want every change to this folder put under version control so you can go back one change at a time if you need to. You also want to put the version control repository on OpenStack (Swift) storage so if you need to move to a different PC, you can get your folder back on a second PC if you sync to the head version. The tool to get this done is Gladinet Cloud Desktop . This article will use Internap XIPCloud as an example. Besides Internap XIPCloud that is based on OpenStack storage, there are also Rackspace Cloud Files, Rackspace UK, Korean Telecom and many others will come.

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.

Google Apps is getting popular. With email, documents and many other services integrated together, it gives Small and Medium sized business (SMB) an excellent cloud infrastructure to run business. This article discuss desktop connectivity for Google Docs business users. For SMBs, typically the first step is moving existing documents into Google Docs for backup. And the second step is to backup Google Docs to local hard drive for business continuity.  This way the main focus of the IT infrastructure is moved to Google Apps and leverage local resources for backup purpose. Gladinet Cloud Desktop is the solution to satisfy both needs.

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.

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 .