Writing to an erasure coded pool in Ceph Rados

CephLately, we’ve been working very closely with RedHat’s Ceph Rados storage and it’s librados API, where we’re seeking ever closer integration with the backend storage to utilise many of Ceph’s benefits.

However lately, we hit an issue where one of our customers had configured their Pool to be erasure coded. Erasure coding is a form of data protection and data redundancy whereby the original file or object is split up into a number of parts, and distributed across a number of storage nodes, either within the same data centres or across multiple multiple data centres and regions.

Continue reading “Writing to an erasure coded pool in Ceph Rados”

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Editing Office files on iOS and Android from OpenStack and other Object Storage Clouds

More and more companies are turning to Object Storage to handle the growing amounts of structured and unstructured data that is corporately generated and consumed.

As companies move to this new storage paradigm IT is struggling  to not only manage, index, and secure the newly migrated / stored data, but also having difficulty with figuring out how they can expose access to users.

Continue reading “Editing Office files on iOS and Android from OpenStack and other Object Storage Clouds”

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Automatically Archiving CIFS Windows Shares to OpenStack Swift, Amazon S3 and other object storage clouds

Following on from our last post in which we demonstrated how CIFS Windows  shares can be exposed outside of the corporate firewall this blog post will focus on how to Archive CIFS Windows shares to OpenStack Swift.

The SME Enterprise Cloud Appliance allows any primary cloud to be paired with a backup cloud for archive and business continuity purposes.

Continue reading “Automatically Archiving CIFS Windows Shares to OpenStack Swift, Amazon S3 and other object storage clouds”

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Storage Made Easy Provides Universal Secure Access for Cloudian Storage Clients

London – October 1, 2013 – Storage Made Easy today announced that it now making it easy than ever for customers of Cloudian, the market-leading cloud storage company, to access their cloud files no matter their device or location.

Cloudian is an Amazon S3-compliant cloud object storage platform that enables service providers and enterprises to build reliable, affordable and scalable cloud storage solutions. With this new integration, Cloudian’s clients can use Storage Made Easy’s technology to synchronize all their storage locations – cloud, NAS/SAN, network, and local, with any device, ensuring easy search and access.

“Cloudian delivers the scale, efficiency and power of the cloud to companies around the world,” said Giorgio Propersi, General Manager, Americas and EMEA. “Now, file access is even easier as Storage Made Easy unites cloud-stored information with other business-critical content, no matter where else it is stored. This is a great advantage for any company to have.”

Storage Made Easy unites public, private and SaaS data into a single, secure environment, guaranteeing file access and cross-service search; it is pre-integrated into existing identity management systems such as Active Directory and LDAP. Storage Made Easy provides a comprehensive unified Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) solution built on top of the SME Cloud Control Gateway. Offered either a SaaS or as a hybrid on-premise solution, it delivers the highest levels of management, security, compliance, audit, and access services for corporate data.

“Storage Made Easy delivers added value to Cloudian’s clients by providing complete connectivity via a virtualized, unified view of all of their files,” says Doug Rich, Storage Made Easy’s General Manager, Americas. “A Cloudian-based public or private cloud maintains its secure access with Storage Made Easy while delivering the information users need, when they need it. We are pleased to make the Cloudian solution even more accessible to users worldwide.”

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Using the SME Cloud Platform with OpenStack 1.60 and Keystone and SWAuth authentication Services

One of the Object Storage Clouds we supported early was OpenStack Swift, which continues to go from strength to strength.

We thought it was time to give a refresh update of how to setup SMEStorage SaaS with OpenStack Swift so that companies / users can easily test / work with their OpenStack Cloud using SMEStorage website and access clients prior to requesting access to our on-presmise Appliance with OpenStack support.

First a refresher on OpenStack authentication:

There are 3 modes of OpenStack authentication:

1. DevAuth: Mostly for development

2. SwAuth: swauth is purely swift authentication

3. Keystone: Keystone is for all OpenStack services and can be configured with just MySQl or it can be integrated with other Identity Management system

SME Supports swauth and Keystone.

For SWAuth

When using swauth we use the standard documented swift methods for authentication and getting the storage url ie as per:

curl -v -H 'X-Storage-User: <tenantName: userName>' -H 'X-Storage-Pass: password' http://IP Address:8080/auth/v1.0

When entering details into the Provider details page for OpenStack on SMEStorage you need to give the tenant name:username and the password. SME also requires a URL endpoint which should be in the format: http://IP Address:8080/auth/v1.0

We expect the following in the response headers

X-Storage-Url: http://storage server IP:PORT/v1/AUTH_xxxxxxxxxx
X-Storage-Token: AUTH_xxxxxxxxxx

We will use the URL and token to connect to OpenStack Swift storage
 

For Keystone:

Ideally Keystone should work as swauth but we have never seen this working correctly. To that end we access keystone making this http request:

curl -d '{"auth": {"tenantName": "username", "passwordCredentials":{"username": "thisisusername", "password": "your password"}}}' -H "Content-type: application/json" http://IP Address:5001/v2.0/tokens

We expect the response in the following JSON format and will take the public URL for swift service and the token to access your swift storage.

 "access": {
       "serviceCatalog": [
           {
               "endpoints": [
                   {
                       "adminURL": "http://IP:PORT/",
                       "internalURL": "http://IP:PORT/v1/AUTH_xxxxxxxxxx",
                       "publicURL": "http://IP:PORT/v1/AUTH_xxxxxxxxxx",
                       "region": "MyRegion"
                   }
               ],
               "endpoints_links": [],
               "name": "swift",
               "type": "object-store"
           },
       ..........
       ],
       .........
       "token": {
           "expires": "2012-09-05T15:34:18Z",
           "id": "TOKEN WE WILL USE",
           }
       }
       }
   }
}

When entering the provider details into SME we require the tenant name:username, password and keystone authorisation server ie. http://IP Address:5001/v2.0/tokens

If you  are unable to connect to the your OpenStack storage please send us the input from the above command and we will check.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Rich Client enabling HP Object Cloud Storage

SMEStorage Cloud File Server now supports HP Object Storage which is in public beta. You can sign up for HP Object Storage from HP Cloud Services here.

To add HP Object Storage to your account after sign up please take the following steps:

Navigate to your DashBoard and choose to add a new Cloud Provider and choose the HP Cloud:

Next follow the wizard to enter the correct information:

When you are authenticated, if there are existing buckets then you can choose to index them to make them available via the SME Cloud File Server and/or you can create a new bucket name:

Next your can choose to sync or index your data. All this does is find out information about your data such as filename, date, size etc.

Once done your data is available to work with through the web rich client as well as other mobile and desktop tools:

In a future blog article we will look at how you can use HP Cloud Storage to implement a full fledged multi-tenant Cloud File Server in which you can assign user permissions and governance controls to data.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather