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 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!

Google Cloud Storage was Google Storage for Developers in the Google Lab. It has since graduated out of the lab and officially became the Google Cloud Storage. In this article, we discuss an easy way to use Google Cloud Storage right from your Windows Explorer interface, with a mapped network drive. If you are not familiar with Google Cloud Storage yet, you can start at https://developers.google.com/storage/ . Step 1 – Activate Google Cloud Storage Before you can use Google Cloud Storage, you will need to at least have a Google account. If you use GMail, Blogger, Picasa or Google Apps, you already have a Google account. You can then activate it at https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/signup

Amazon S3 was designed with developers as its audience. Developers create applications around the Amazon S3 and those applications are used by the end user. Seeing the amazing growth from Amazon S3, we are also seeing more and more people from real estates, dental office and many other small and medium sized businesses started to use Amazon S3 directly since the aws.amazon.com web-front provides many basic functionalities. Gladinet supports Amazon S3 from day one with functionalities like map a network drive to Amazon S3; backup to Amazon S3; leverage Amazon S3 as a PC-2-PC sync bridge and conduit. As long as you have your master Amazon S3 account credentials, you can use Gladinet software with Amazon S3. Now, Amazon introduced IAM (identity and account management) in its aws.amazon.com web interface. This introduced new user identities in one single master account. So now, not only it is possible to have a set of master account credentials, normal S3 admins can also create sub-use...

Amazon S3 is getting more and more popular with Small and Medium sized Businesses(SMBs). These SMBs typically have mobile workers and office workers. They are looking for a cloud drive solution for a team of users. The earlier solutions from Gladinet requires the Amazon S3 master account holder to share the account credentials with the team so each team member can mount the same Amazon S3 account and buckets, thus they can all use the same cloud drive. With the latest version from Gladinet , it is now possible to integrate and leverage the Amazon Identity and Account Management (IAM) feature so each team member can have a set of unique credentials and get assigned a special bucket to use, while the account master keeps the mater account secrets to himself.

Amazon S3 is the leading and most mature cloud storage service in the market now. We have seen more and more customers started to use Amazon S3 for their storage need.  For these customers, the ability to map Amazon S3 as a Network Drive is critical. Drive mapping allows them to double click on a file and editing it in place. From a usability perspective, there is no more user interface to learn because hard drive, or USB drive and now a cloud based drive is a very familiar concept in Windows user interface. This article will document the steps it takes to map Amazon S3 as a network drive with the latest Gladinet Cloud Desktop .

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.

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?

Google has different storage options before the announcement of the Google Storage for Developers . You can store file attachments in GMail, pictures in Picasa and documents in Google Docs. With the announcement of the Google Storage for Developers as a generic Google storage, now it is possible to build applications around the Google Storage and have secure backup functionality on top of the cloud storage. Gladinet software has the AES-256 support since version 2.0. With the recent support of the Google Storage for Developers Tech Preview, Gladinet has an answer for you to backup files securely with the Google Storage. The system encrypts your files before saving them on the Google servers in their encrypted form.

Google Storage for Developers is Google’s  cloud storage offering with a RESTful API over HTTP/HTTPS. It allows developers to build applications around the Google’s cloud storage offering.  Gladinet is building applications around the cloud storage, allowing you to access and backup to the cloud storage through a mapped network drive. With the version 2.2.378 , you can preview the features with the Google Storage on a network drive.

  First you need to have a Mezeo account and the address of the access point. The user name typically is your email address. The access point normally is in the form of https://eval.mezeo.net/v2 , which you can get when you sign up for a mezeo account. Second you will need to install Gladinet Cloud Desktop from the download page . (Support for Mezeo will be introduced in version 2.1 which will be available April, 2010) Launch Gladinet Cloud Desktop Click to Mount Use the click-to-mount icon in your Gladinet Drive to mount Mezeo Cloud Storage. When the mount virtual directory dialog appears, select Mezeo Personal Cloud. Use your Mezeo Server address/credential Use Mezeo Cloud Storage From Windows Explorer Directly Now you can use the Mezeo Cloud Storage as if it were a Virtual Drive or Folder. Simply drag and drop to backup local documents to the FTP storage.

EMC Atmos Storage is great if you are a developer looking for a storage solution for your applications or if you are an enterprise that is willing to rewrite your applications to work with the new protocols for cloud storage. But what if you just want to access cloud storage from your desktop with your existing applications?   In that case, you need Gladinet Cloud Desktop . It provides a mapped network drive interface to Atmos Storage, making it accessible through a local drive.  This enables users to access and manage files in Atmos Storage exactly as they would if they were stored on their desktop. Gladinet Cloud Desktop also provides backup management services which make it easy to backup important files to Atmos Storage.

Gladinet Cloud Desktop provides a mapped network drive interface to Google Docs making GDrive accessible through a local drive letter, like G: or any other one that is available. This enables users to access and manage files in Google Storage exactly as they would on their desktop. And with Google Docs new any file type support, any file can be easily transferred (or backed up) to Google Docs. To mount Google Docs, first launch the mounting wizard from the systray menu for Gladinet Cloud Desktop: This launches the wizard. Select Google Docs from the drop down list box on the first page: Choose a name for the virtual directory. This is the name for the folder that will appear under “My Gladinet Drive (Z:)” on your desktop. Click next and enter your credentials: Click next, verify the information and click Finish: Now Google Docs storage is attached to your local drive: Now you can transfer an entire drive to Google Docs with a single d...

EMC Atmos Online is cool and it is different from Amazon S3. We are happy to announce the support of EMC Atmos Online side by side with Amazon S3, starting build 130 in the version 1.1 RC. This is an important step to bring a multi-storage backup solution to users. One of a common concern about using cloud storage is a single point of failure or locking into a single vendor. By supporting multiple cloud storage vendors from the groud up, the Gladinet Cloud Desktop software allows you to backup data into multiple storage vendors at the same time. You can use the Gladinet Backup Manager, select your local files, select both the EMC Atmos Online and the Amazon S3, then select the backup schedule. After that, it will be on auto-piloting to the cloud storage backup. We saw the news 3 weeks ago about EMC, AT&T partner on 'Atmos' Cloud Storage( http://tinyurl.com/laqyv9 ). This means version 1.1 will likely to support AT&T as well. Sign up for an EMC Atmos Online beta account,...