Enterprise File Fabric™
SMEStorage Linux Cloud Drive
On our Labs page we have now released the Linux Cloud Drive beta 4. In this release we have:
– Added support for caching when uploading small files as they were a performance hog previously
– eradicated some bugs when using the visual Linux file manager
– Added packages for CentOS, Fedora, and OpenSUSE
– Added support for sharing the drive with other networks, such as windows, via SAMBA.
We’ll post a more in depth blog-post on the SAMBA sharing soon.
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Beta 4 of the Linux Cloud Drive will be released soon. This will add the ability to share the Linux Cloud Drive as an SMB/CIFS resource via Samba to networks that can mounts SMB/CIFS shares such as windows.
This provides a very easy mechanism to share clouds mounted via the SMEStorage Cloud Gateway to multiple network resources. Many public storage clouds can be shared this way, such as Amazon S3, Google Docs, RackSpace CloudFiles, MobileMe, Mezeo and many more. Importantly, SMEStorage also supports WebDav Resource endpoints which give companies an easy way to share legacy resources within a cloud files system environment directly from the desktop or command line.
The Linux Cloud Drive beta 4 will be released before the end of May.
by The below blog post is taken from a recent blog by Roman Gelembjuk which we liked and thought it was worth re-posting here:
I have tested a lot of tool and services to store files online. I chosen SMEStorage.com and use it now. I found most problems of online storage services is the speed of accessing the file. If you need to get some file from your cloud you must:
What do you do if you have to get 1 file very quick and with a poor Internet connection?
I found a simple solution that works fine with slow connections, and this is a combination of the Linux Drive from SMEStorage.com and Midnight Commander. The Linux Cloud Drive is a tool that mounts the SMEStorage file system to the local file system (on linux). SMEStorage provides a cloud gateway in which it syncs the file meta-data from different storage clouds but all the files continue to reside on the original storage platform. The Cloud Storage Providers SMEStorage currently supports include Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, Box.net, MobileME, Microsoft Live SkyDrive, Microsoft Live Mesh, GMail-as-a-Cloud, Email-as-a-Cloud, FTP-as-a-Cloud, and any WebDav enabled cloud.
It is possible to browse many different storage clouds using the SMEStorage Linux Cloud Drive with any filemanager after it is mounted. Usually, linux filemanagers (in different distributions) try to preload some files (documents, images) to create thumbnails . This is fine if the files are stored locally but not good if they are not, because of the time needed to load all the file information from the remote server .
I found an easy solution to prevent this – using Midnight Commander. This filemanager doesn’t load any files . That is why it works very fast with file systems that are not local. So now when i want to get some file very quick from my cloud I Run SMEStorage Linux Drive, mount it and the run Midnight Commander, browse the relevant folder, and get the required file. This is very fast!
by The third beta of our Linux Cloud Drive is now available for download. This version fixes some version issue when launching documents and files directly from the Cloud Drive and then saving them back.
The Linux Drive gives access to the following Clouds as a virtual drive within Linux:
A brief demonstration of the drive can be seen in the video below:
by We’ve released the third beta of our Linux Drive. You can find this on our labs page. The Linux drive enables you to access your Cloud Storage files directly from Linux. How does it work ? Simple:
1. Register for an account with SMEStorage and sync the cloud storage vendor(s) of your choice, be it Google Docs, Amazon S3, Microsoft SkyDrive, Microsoft Live Mesh, GMail Files, FTP files, Box.net, Apple MobileMe, Email files, or any WebDav Cloud. Remember depending on the account you choose you can map multiple storage vendors to one account.
2. Sync your file meta data via the smestorage gateway
3. Install the Linux Cloud Drive, and voila ! You can access your files directly from a drive from you Linux desktop.
Have a look at the video below to see how easy this is:
by We have some really exciting things lined up for the New Year, one of which is the re-launch of the site with a new look and feel, and the other is some fantastic new ways you can use SMEStorage. We are currently mid way through developing out Mac and Linux virtual drives and expect both of them to be available before the end of January.
These virtual drives will map onto your underlying clouds just as the windows version does. This will mean that you can double click into the virtual drive and access up to 10 different storage clouds depending on your package.
A screenshot of the Mac version in use can be seen below:
In the meantime all that remains is to wish you all a happy festive season and thanks for your support over 2009 .
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