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How to securely web enable access to CIFS / SMB File Shares

One of the predominant use cases that many companies have is to enable file access to SMB file shares that live behind the corporate firewall , or indeed  are hosted on IaaS infrastructures (such as Amazon FSX or Azure Files), without the need for a VPN and without reconfiguring permissions whilst using Active Directory or LDAP for authentication and also ensuring that data is secure and compliance legislation is satisfied.

This has of course become even more of a requisite during the recent Covid-19 pandemic in which there is a pressing need to enabled. such access for remote workers.

Global storage Metamodel

Accessing files over CIFS/SMB network over VPN using a mobile network is possible but access can be patchy, clients apps limited and it is often extremely slow.

The File Fabric enables this using its built in CIFS / SMB connector. This blog post will step through how to web enable SMB file shares.

Continue reading “How to securely web enable access to CIFS / SMB File Shares”

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Customer Case Study – Data Management and Collaboration for Ceph and File Based Data Storage

ITRI (Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute), is a world-leading applied technology research institute which is also a key player in autonomous vehicle development.

Its technology combines real-time positioning, mapping technology, machine learning, and a range of sensors to simulate driving and capture test data in real world situations. This process generates massive amounts of data that need to be analyzed quickly and precisely, and here is where the the Storage Made Easy (SME) Enterprise File Fabric comes into play.

Continue reading “Customer Case Study – Data Management and Collaboration for Ceph and File Based Data Storage”

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How to Enable Remote Employees to Securely Access On-premises Company Data in Under 1 Hour

Interest in letting employees to work from home has never been higher and will remain high even after the Covid-19 virus has run its course.  For Companies large and small  the key challenge is how to make Company data available remotely in a way that is easy for employees to use without compromising on information security.  The Enterprise File Fabric™ offers an unmatched set of features to support secure remote working.  In this post we’ll see how to set up the File Fabric in less than an hour to provide secure remote access to on-premises data, be that SMB, NAS / SAN or Microsoft DFS shares.  The best part is that data is not copied or removed anywhere, it remains in the same secure place and the File Fabric provides web scale secure access  to it .

Continue reading “How to Enable Remote Employees to Securely Access On-premises Company Data in Under 1 Hour”

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Share Files Securely Using Slack and the Enterprise File Fabric

Slack is a cloud-based collaboration tool which many teams and organisations already use as a collaboration hub. The File Fabric is a ‘single pane of glass’ fo unstructured file data, be that on-clodu or on-premises and it makes using, sharing, and accessing these files ultra secure. The File Fabric Slack connector brings together the best collaboration hub with the best File hub !

Continue reading “Share Files Securely Using Slack and the Enterprise File Fabric”

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Using the SME Data Access Platform with Cisco Smart Storage

Cisco Smart Storage is a high-speed network attached storage solution that is affordable for SMB’s as well as the Enterprise. Cisco Smart Storage supports WebDav which means you can easily take advantage of the SMEStorage Data Access Platform to access and manage your files.

Cisco SMart Storage supports  WebDAV which means the  the Cisco Smart Storage NAS user will be able to access shared folders from SMEStorage Data Access Clients, such as the Web, Operating Systems, and of course iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and (soon) Android clients.

To work with Cisco Smart Storage with SMEStorage you first need to enable WebDav support. This can be done from Network Services->Web Server from the Smart Storage config screens.

Next you need to setup WebDav access rights for shared folders.You can do this by choosing Network Shares->Shared Folders and click WebDav Access control in the Action column, and then setup the access rights for the folder.

Now you are ready to configure your Smart Storage to be accessed from SMEStorage. First sign up for a free account and choose the “WebDav compliant storage” package. Once you have registered, log in and you can then enter your Smart Storage WebDav details.

Once completed you can access your SmartStorage anywhere in the world via the web, use sophisticated Windows sync tools to sync files from your desktop, access your storage with rich business and collaboration functionality from your iPhone / iPad and BlackBerry, and have access to much more tools and clients that can be found on our Tools page. Additional to this you can also upgrade to a multi-cloud account to see an aggregated view of all your public and private cloud storage files. For example you could see all your Cisco Smart Storage, Google Docs, and Microsoft SkyDrive files all from one Virtual Cloud File System (VCFS).

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How to build your own Private Cloud / Sharepoint replacement using Openfiler and SME

There are many ways to design and build an internal Private storage cloud. The components that you need are:

1. Some form of  Network Attached Storage
2. Some form of File Server to enable access to the files
3. Other Data Access or entry points dependent on the access type required

SME provides a data access gateway with rich data access points to files that are stored on the cloud. Our SaaS offering is multi-tenant and can be used with many clouds, such as Google Docs, Amazon S3, Microsoft SkyDrive, RackSpace Cloud Files etc. It can also be used with Private Cloud Storage through the use of FTP, WebDav, or any REST based Cloud API which can be added into our multi-cloud API in under a week.

SME acts as an enabler for richer features and functions of other storage clouds or storage file systems, providing rich tooling, clients and solutions such as our Cloud File Server.

We think of ourselves as  a data access solutions provider. Storage is getting more commoditised by the day and we believe that it’ what you can do with your files and storage that provides the real value.

Aside from the multi-tenant hosted version of SME we also provide SME as an appliance which can run in-house as an enabler for rich access and solutions for storage platforms.

This blog post will describe how easy it is to be build out your own Private Cloud using OpenFiler, an operating system that provides file-based network-attached storage and block-based storage area network, and SME (and you can use either the SaaS hosted edition or the appliance).

Openfiler supports:

  • CIFS/SMB support for Microsoft Windows-based clients
  • NFSv3 support for all UNIX clients with support for ACL protocol extensions
  • NFSv4 support
  • FTP support
  • WebDAV and HTTP 1.1 support

Combining OpenFiler with SME  enables your internal files to be available on all the SME supported devices (web, windows, Mac, Linux iPhone, Blackberry etc) plus the features of the Organisation Cloud platform which enable a powerful File sharing / File access / Collaboration / Intranet/  Sharepoint type platform.

Below are the step by step instructions  to enable Openfiler NAS storage access via the SME platform.

1. Download Openfiler form http://www.openfiler.com/community/download/ For this exercise we downloaded the open filer  VMware image

2. Add a SCSI drive to the VMware Image instance

3. Start the Openfiler VMware Instance and note the browser url

4. Open your browser and login default username/password is openfiler/password

5. Add a volume group and volume in openfiler

6. Enable HTTP / WebDAV server service

7. Add SME to access the openfiler in Network Access configuration

8. Create a share for the volume you created

9. Allow RW access and Public guest access(though this can be configured with security) on WebDav protocol from SME on the share

10. Make sure you can access the shared folder via http using your public ip address

11. Go to StorageMadeEasy.com and add the shared folder as  a webDav provider

12. If you have existing files in Openfiler then you can sync them now or anyother time.In this case we don’t have any files to sync.

13. Go to the SME File Manager where you can see OpenFiler has been added

14. Now you can use the full functionality of the SME platform and Cloud access tools using OpenFiler as the backend storage provider

In summary we’ve shown how to setup OpenFiler to work with Storage Made Easy. In a future post we’ll show how SME can be used to automatically sync files to Amazon S3 or Google Docs (or other clouds).

As outlined in introduction to this post, Storage Made Easy can be used as an onsite appliance with OpenFiler rather than the hosted model being used. If this is of interest to you then please contact us.

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