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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”

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Using Amazon S3 with the SME Cloud Gateway Appliance is now free !

From today, using your own Amazon S3 keys is not free ! Previously the only way to use Amazon S3 with SMEStorage was to sign up for the Individual Lifetime Cloud package which gives you access to up to 10 storage clouds in one virtual view, and also our comprehensive windows tools.

Amazon S3 includes support for buckets from all regions and also supports visual RRS and RRS conversion as well as managed file encryption, and the integration with services such as Zoho and Picnik for in-browser document  and image editing. We also provide a free Windows Cloud Dashboard to work with your files. Unlike other Amazon S3 tools our aim is to present a business overlay on top of Amazon S3 rather than a complete tech view that other tools and providers support.

SMEStorage Windows Cloud Dashboard

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Mac Cloud Drive beta 4 for Google Docs, S3, SkyDrive + other clouds released

We’ve just updated our Labs page with the beta 4 of our Mac Drive. This is a huge step forward in our goal of having a robust multi-cloud drive for the Mac OSX. We now have implemented a cache to keep Finder happy when files are first copied or dropped there, and we add them to a queue so that they are uploaded in the background. If you shut down then the files resume next time you fire up the laptop and the drive is mounted

We also catch queueing operations so we can deal with renames and deletes, and we also now support the opening of encrypted files as well as letting you get a URL for a file using Finder Service actions. You can watch the video below to get more of a feel for what the drive does.


Mac Cloud Drive Beta 4 for Google Docs, S3, SkyDrive other Clouds

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SME add support for Mezeo Personal Cloud Storage

** This is an old post and Mezeo is no longer active

We’ve just added Mezeo Personal Cloud Storage to the list of cloud providers that we support. This means you can use SMEStorage as a gateway to your Mezeo account and access your data via our Windows Cloud Desktop tools, our Linux and Mac virtual drives (currently in beta) and also through the iPhone and BlackBerry cellular devices. You can also take advantage of our iPad application which is being submitted to Apple in the next few days, and of course all our other integrations, such as Firefox, Facebook, WordPress etc.

If you are using Mezeo On-Premise and wish to be able to use our Data Access platform with Mezeo, that include  our unique collaboration and Work Portal features that are available with our Organisation Cloud offering,  then please contact us.

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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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Mac & Linux virtual cloud drive due in New Year

We have some really exciting things lined up for the New Year, one of which is the re-launch of the site with a new look and feel, and the other is some fantastic new ways you can use SMEStorage. We are currently mid way through developing out Mac and Linux virtual drives and expect both of them to be available before the end of January.

These virtual drives will map onto your underlying clouds just as the windows version does. This will mean that you can double click into the virtual drive and access up to 10 different storage clouds depending on your package.

A screenshot of the Mac version in use can be seen below:

mac-vdrive-sshot

In the meantime all that remains is to wish you all a happy festive season and thanks for your support over 2009 .

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