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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