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Joint Presentation with SciNet on integrating Storage Made Easy with HPSS

Storage Made Easy recently gave a joint presentation with SciNet for the HUF2015 Conference.

The presentation focused on the integration of Storage Made Easy with the High Performance Storage System (HPSS).

HPSS is a flexible, scalable, policy-based Hierarchical Storage Management product, developed as the result of over two decades of collaboration among five Department of Energy laboratories in the USA and IBM, with significant contributions by universities and other laboratories worldwide. It provides scalable hierarchical storage management (HSM), archive, and file system services using cluster, LAN and SAN technologies to aggregate the capacity and performance of many computers, disks, disk systems, tape drives and tape libraries.

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Mac Cloud Drive updated to beta 3

We’ve updated the Mac Cloud Drive to beta 3. This resolve an issue relating to Google Docs and Skydrive. When these two cloud providers are first sync’d it is not possible to know the file size. After the files are first downloaded through the SMEStorage platform the file size is discovered and available thereafter. This does not cause problems in other clients but the Mac file system has a problem with downloading what appears to be zero sized files.

We have therefore introduced a fix in this build that enable any zero length files to be downloaded within the file system when using the Virtual Drive. The Mac Drive is available for download on our Labs page.

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How to access Google Docs, S3, SkyDrive and more from a cloud drive on your Mac

We recently released beta two of our FUSE based Cloud Drive for the Mac. The drive was developed on Snow Leopard but seems to work fine under Leopard also.

The drive enables you to use the Cloud Accounts that you access via the SMEStorage Cloud Gateway directly on your Mac throughFinder. The drive is installed as a Preferences Pane within the Mac System Preferences. Once mounted there is a SME icon that appears in the taskbar that turns red or green depending whether data is being uploaded or downloaded. The icon also lets you mount/ unmount the drive and refresh the view.

You can also access the files directly from Terminal using ‘/Volume/SMEFileSystemRW’. We notice in a forum post that someone had even tried using rsync with their Googe Docs account which is pretty neat.

The drive is now starting to become more stable as we would expect from a beta 2 release. We are now going to concentrate on 3 main things for the drive: Performance, Encryption support, and Sync (much in the same way DropBox support sync).

You can watch a short video below of the drive in action:

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The easiest and quickest way to access Cloud Storage on Linux

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:

  • Start The browser
  • Open the site (ex. storagemadeeasy.com)
  • Login to the site
  • Open the page with the relevant files
  • Also, sometimes you must to browse folders and this is a new page/data loading for each folder

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!

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