CentreStack transforms traditional file servers into cloud file servers

An interesting use case came up recently. It is an university environment, with two popular technologies involved in the setup. One is VDI – Desktop Virtualization. The other is Google Drive. Desktop virtualization provides an easy to manage way for universities to deploy desktops to students. Most of the students have their own device such as laptop. With VDI, the students can run a virtual desktop loaded with university-licensed software for class related activities. Google Drive provides an easy way for students to store class related materials and projects. Most of the students have Google Drive installed on their laptop so the class materials can stay inside Google Drive. Problem arises when students want to access Google Drive inside the virtual desktop. The Google Drive’s full-two-way sync operating mode doesn’t work well inside Virtual Desktop because the virtual desktop gets recycled when the student’s session is over. Full two-way sync is time and resource consuming and no...

When it comes to cloud storage use case, everyone agrees that it needs to have web browser based access and mobile access, plus Desktop clients so the data can flow from desktop to web browser and to mobile devices. Google Drive seems to have everything, it has a web browser based access the same as we knew as Google Docs web interface. It has mobile app. It has Desktop client that has a local Google Drive folder that does two-way sync with the Google Drive Storage. A recent use case we saw is quite interesting. It shows that Google Drive needs a drive letter and direct random access to work well.

Google offers several storage services. There is Google Drive, which is replacing the Google Docs. There is also Google Cloud Storage, which provide raw REST based cloud storage service. Some customer use cases may be best served by Google Drive and there are others that may be more suitable for Google Cloud Storage. For example, if you are a Google Apps customer looking for a file sharing or collaboration solution, Google Drive may be the obvious choice – especially if you’re already using Google Docs. On the other hand, if you want to migrate or backup file server data to the cloud, Google Cloud Storage is probably the better fit. Some will even compare Google Drive to Dropbox and Google Cloud Storage with Amazon S3. But the catch is that many customers do not fall squarely into one category or the other. Instead, they have overlapping needs and face the challenge of piecing together a solution that meets all these needs. Here comes a need to have a single piece of middleware that ...

Google Drive is here and it is cool. It works like Google Docs with a drop-box. If you want to upload files, you can drop the files inside this specific “Google Drive” local folder and the files will sync up. Also the files you changed from other places can be synced down to this “Google Drive” folder too. As data grow, this automatically all-sync-up method may not be as desirable. Google Drive comes with this “Only Sync some folders” feature. It allows you to select which folder to sync and which folder not to sync. However, for the folder you don’t want to sync, you lose the ability of real-time access to the Google Drive file. Now comes Gladinet to help!