Customer Case Study: Providing Secure End User Access, Object Storage File Services, Governance and Compliance for a Top Tier Financial Services Firm

A global financial services firm was facing two critical challenges. First, a portfolio risk management application was working off a local server, which was a single point of failure. Secondly, the permission structure implemented was inadequate given the sensitivity of the data.

In our latest case study we show how the adoption of the Enterprise File Fabric provided secure end user File access to Cloudian Hyperstore ObjectStorage whilst maintaining Data Governance and Data Compliance.

Continue reading “Customer Case Study: Providing Secure End User Access, Object Storage File Services, Governance and Compliance for a Top Tier Financial Services Firm”

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Non-Proprietary Storage Workflows for Media Asset Management

Today’s Media and Entertainment workflows can depend on multiple storage types and their associated protocols.  Assets might be delivered via an AWS S3 bucket, Dropbox share, Azure Blob container, proprietary file acceleration vendor, FTP, SFTP, or a host of other new technologies.  Once delivered an asset needs to navigate Hot, Nearline, and Archival storages while being edited, conformed, transcoded, shared, distributed and broadcasted.

While some software vendors have updates allowing access to some of the cloud based storage protocols, other applications remain stuck exclusively on only internal NFS or CIFS access.  When this happens many workflows are downgraded to the lowest common denominator (CIFS/NFS) preventing the use of more cost effective, durable or highly available scale-out storage systems.  Alternatively, a CIFS/NFS gateway might be considered to “convert” protocols.  However, almost all gateways proprietize data and compromise the cost savings of scale-out storage.

The Enterprise File Fabric speaks multiple protocols/APIs, indexes data in-place and can eliminate workflow headaches without proprietizing the data.

Continue reading “Non-Proprietary Storage Workflows for Media Asset Management”

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Migrating and Tiering Video Data with Object Storage and the Storage Made Easy InfiniDrive

InfiniDriveChallenge

A blue-chip services organization receives, processes and shares almost 1/2 TB of new video each day. That’s hundreds of thousands of files from thousands of remote cameras. Their issue was that as the volume increased the existing file-based storage platform could not keep up. It would take up to a minute for videos and images to be retrieved, severely impacting worker productivity. The storage also become more expensive to maintain, in part because it was difficult to scale.

The company moved to object storage to reduce costs whilst also increasing performance and scalability. Unfortunately, the custom applications that ingested, processed and distributed video and images were written for the file-based storage. This left a gap in the ability to fulfill the storage use case and to proceed effectively with the migration.

Continue reading “Migrating and Tiering Video Data with Object Storage and the Storage Made Easy InfiniDrive”

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

S3 Drive Brings S3 Compatible Storage to the Windows Desktop

drive Amazon S3Object storage gives the enterprise reliable, low-cost storage of essentially unlimited capacity, providing the perfect platform for big data sets, media stores and other high volume use cases.  On its own, though, object storage is a poor fit for end-user use cases such as home directories and departmental shares because it doesn’t integrate with the Windows file system.

To make object storage work for Windows users we created the S3 Drive, a robust, scalable desktop app that turns any S3-compatible storage into a fully functional Windows 7, 8 or 10 filesystem.  You can access the S3 Drive from the Windows command line, from any Windows application and through Windows Explorer just like any other drive on your Windows machine.   Standard Windows features such as copy-paste and drag-and-drop are supported.

Continue reading “S3 Drive Brings S3 Compatible Storage to the Windows Desktop”

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Why Mac OSX WebDav is not it for purpose

WebDav is a great ubiquitous protocol for file transfer. It’s been around a long time and is well supported. If you want to know more about WebDav please check out our white paper on the WebDav protocol.

Unfortunately WebDav for Mac OSX is not implemented well and is the reason we block the use of our own CloudDav WebDav protocol adaptor, that spans all mapped Clouds, and promote the use of the Cloud Drive within our Mac OS X App.

Continue reading “Why Mac OSX WebDav is not it for purpose”

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Dedicated OpenStack Swift Windows Drive now available

Post Updated October 6th 2016

We now have plenty of companies and ISP’s who are using our full Enterprise File Share and Sync solution for OpenStack but we have long been approached by companies asking if they could have just the drive piece of our functionality available that works in a dedicated fashion outside of our full EFSS solution.

To that end we are pleased to announce the release of a dedicated OpenStack Windows CIFS Drive that is a standalone installer that works directly with OpenStack Swift instances.

Install is simple:

OpenStack Drive InstallerOpenStack Cloud Drive

Continue reading “Dedicated OpenStack Swift Windows Drive now available”

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Cloud Computing Use Case: Extending Remote Desktop with a Cloud Drive

Many service providers and companies offer Remote Desktop Services to enable companies to access their desktop remotely. Applications are installed for the users where user settings and data are saved to their profile.

We’ve had a few requests from companies and service providers now who wanted users to easily be able to access data on remote clouds (such as Azure, DropBox, Box, FTP, WebDav, Sharepoint Amazon S3 etc) from a remote desktop.

With Storage Made Easy, this is easily done as SME presents a WebDav entry point to all clouds that SME supports whether they support WebDav or not. This means the service provider needs only co-locate the SME software appliance (supplied as an OVF compliant file) in their network and add a simple script to the users startup. The script it:

NET USE * \\webdav.storagemadeeasy.com@SSL\DavWWWRoot
pause

This enables user to get a mapped drive to remote cloud storage as soon as they login to their remote desktop and to browse and access these files like any other data drive and is a simple solution for bringing remote clouds directly into a users remote desktop using a simple metaphor they understand, “a drive”.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Adding a WebDav Drive for access to almost any Cloud Storage on Windows 8 RT Surface Tablet

Windows RT Surface is a great tablet but the non-pro edition is pretty locked down and getting access to files from the integrated Apps can be an issue. Enter SME Personal Cloud.

Amongst other desktop tools the SME Personal Cloud comes with what we refer to as CloudDav and provides WebDav access to any of the Cloud Storage Accounts that you have mapped to your Account.

Enabling WebDav on the Windows Surface Tablet can be done simply with a batch file in the following format:

NET USE * \\webdav.storagemadeeasy.com@SSL\DavWWWRoot
pause

(or NET USE * \\webdaveu.storagemadeeasy.com@SSL\DavWWWRoot for the SME EU Server)

Once this is done you have a fully functional cloud drive on your Surface Tablet to get to all your public / private cloud files !

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Monthly bandwidth limit doubled to 2GB for free users

We doubled our monthly bandwidth limit for free users to 2GB today. This is immediately applicable to all new users and all existing users on the free package. If you are a user on an older package just let us know and we’ll apply it to your package also.

What else can you get for free ?

– Free Windows Cloud Explorer + Cloud Drive + Microsoft and OpenOffice Plug-In’s
– Free WordPress Backup Plug-In
– Free Firefox plug-in
– Free Chrome Plug-in
– Free Safari Plugin
– Free FaceBook App

Be sure to check out our Cloud Tools page for all of these and other free tools !

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

New version of Windows Cloud Drive and Sync Tools released

We’ve updated our Windows Cloud Tools which are available to purchase by free users or as part of the Personal Lifetime and Team Cloud File Server Plans. The tools integrate the Cloud directly in the desktop via the means of a Cloud Drive with a drive letter that you can control, and also come with sophisticated sync tooling and a Cloud Management DashBoard

These are now available to all existing users of the Cloud Tools that are under support by logging into their DashBoard  and navigating to Cloud Add In’s.

Updated include:

– Fixed a Sync Centre ordering bug that could occur on scheduled sync

– Added speed (byte rate) limits.

– Sync Center – fixed windows system function GetLastWriteTimeUtc bug that cause an issue with some timestamps.

– saves endpoint when credentials are not saved.

– Added new endpoint MyCompany.FileServerApp.com/api, to be easier for appliance users to manage their private Clouds.

– Sync Center: Now runs in background when launched by schedulers. Shows a log at the end, if there were sync errors, or if “Don’t close” was checked when scheduled.

– Retries failed HTTP requests (3 times, at 3 seconds interval).

– Skip folders that failed to create.

– Logs more info on failed folders.

– Virtual Drive performance improvement

– WIndows 64 bit IFS Virtual Drive Driver update :resolves issue for some 64 bit machines

– other Minor fixes.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather