Posted on

Achieving S3 API compatibility with OpenStack Swift using SME

One of the things that is close to our hearts at SMEStorage is interoperability and, wherever possible, enabling open solutions. As outlined in our previous post, we recently added support for OpenStack Swift object storage. Of course there are other Object Storage frameworks, such as Amazon S3, but this is closed source, unlike Swift. There are however open source implementations of the Amazon S3 API’s including Walrus from Eucalyptus. There are also many tools, solutions, exiting code and frameworks that use S3 compatible API’s, and no doubt there will be occassions when it would be useful to enable users to connect to SWift using Amazon S3 API’s.

As SMEStorage has a compatible S3 API abstraction it turns out that is very easy. Let’s demonstrate how easy below:


After launching the free version of CloudBerry explorer Choose File-Walrus Accounts, and then choose to add an account.

The endpoint for the s3 compatible interface with SMEStorage is s3.storagemadeeasy.com. The username is the SMEStorage Account username, and the secret key can be found for each user on the “My DashBoard” page under a section called “Tech Info“.

Once we have entered the details we can test the connection:

and finally we can connect over the S3 API to work with our OpenStack Swift files:

As you can see this was easy and takes less than a couple of minutes to access and work with OpenStack Swift files using S3. We expect it to be very useful for ISP’s and SMB’s who want to deploy their own private cloud solution using OpenStack and enables interoperability and prevents lock-in.

Update: Note that in the Swift Diablo release that OpenStack also supports the ability to turn on Amazon S3 API’s.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather
Posted on

Release of Cloud Backup Tool for S3, Google Storage, RackSpace, OpenStack and Eucalytpus Walrus

As well as updating our main site today, we also released a Windows Cloud backup / upload tool for the Amazon S3, Google Storage, and the RackSpace Cloud Files Storage platforms.

The Cloud Backup Tool also supports the Swift Storage framework as well as the Eucalyptus Walrus platform which enable users and ISP’s to implement their own private object storage cloud implementations.

We had many of our users who wanted a simple tool to upload large volumes of files from their windows desktop to clouds such as RackSpace, Google Storage and S3. They wanted such a tool to automatically check and update prior versions of files the next time they uploaded the same structure. It got to the point where we actually built such a tool for one of our customers that uses RackSpace and then we extended it for another customer that used Amazon S3. At this point we decided to broaden it to use other clouds and make it commercially available.

It is a fairly simple tool but it seems to fill a niche in that it can be used to get large volumes of files into the Cloud for these providers.

As we were getting so many requests for users who wanted to use private cloud implementations we decided to add in the support for these also, as both Walrus and Swift are basically the same API implementation as Amazon S3 and RackSpace Cloud Files with the exception of a user definable endpoint.

The Enterprise Cloud Backup tools is available to purchase from the SMEStorage website for $9.99 and works only on the Windows Operating System.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather
Posted on

SME adds S3 compatible API access for many clouds including Google Docs, Google Storage, RackSpace + more

We’re happy to roll out support for another API that is becoming ubiquitous. In this case it is the Amazon S3 API. This is already used in solutions such as Eucalyptus Walrus, and we have now also added it as entry point for files accessed through our Cloud Gateway.

What does this mean ? It means you can use the S3 compatible API to access your files on Google Docs, or Google Storage, or RackSpace Cloud Files, or MIcrosoft SkyDrive, or any of the many other Clouds that we support.

For those interested, moving from a file based structure to a flat file object structure was achieved using the depth first algorithm within the implementation mapping to our API.

Lets look at a practical implementation of this using a tool that supports S3 compatible endpoints, CloudBerry explorer. We’ll use this to access our Google Docs, although we could have chosen DropBox, or any other number of clouds to access.

After launching the free version of CloudBerry explorer Choose File-Walrus Accounts

Choose to add an account and fill in the endpoint as ‘s3.storagemadeeasy.com’ and the QueryID as your SME username. You can obtain the API key from logging into the SME website and going to “My Account” from the sidebar and copying the API key from where it says “API secret Key”

Now you can choose to access the service using the CloudBerry exlorer:

and you can browse, download, upload files:

You can find out more on the SME Wiki

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather
Posted on

Multi Cloud Storage API Updated

We have just update our multi-cloud API manual and published it on Google Code. We also have added some more code examples in PHP to supplement those in .Net, and added a PERL libaray example with a test PERL app as well.

The multi-cloud API now supports Amazon S3, RackSpace Cloud Files, Box.net, MobileME, Gmail, Any Email, FTP, Google Docs, Evernote, and any WebDav enabled cloud. Coming soon will be Microsoft SkyDrive, Twitter, Deicious, and Walrus from Eucalyptus.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather