Cloud Storage Portal

In Windows, we have enjoyed easy access to different kind of drives from one single name space and portal – Windows Explorer.  For such a long time, we take for granted the convenience of storage portal feature in Windows. Whether it is a CD-ROM drive, a Floppy drive, several hard drives or different network drives, they are all easily accessible from My Computers in Windows.
What if we could do the same to cloud storage services?
Before we talk about cloud storage portal, let’s first bring up the different cloud storage technology families. Of all the cloud storage services you can use out there, there are basically 8 different technologies out there:

Backup to Rackspace Cloud Files

Rackspace Cloud Files include Rackspace Cloud Files US and Rackspace Cloud Files UK. It is an excellent choice for online backup purpose, especially when you are already using other Rackspace services.
This article covers steps to backup local files and folders to Rackspace Cloud Files
First you will need to acquire a Rackspace Cloud Files account. If you need a US account, you will sign up at  Rackspace Cloud Files US. If you need a UK account, you will sign up at Rackspace Cloud Files UK.
After that, you can install Gladinet Cloud Desktop as a Desktop application to connect to your Rackspace Cloud Files account.  The connected Rackspace Cloud Files account will show up like a locally attached network drive, allowing you to do drag-n-drop copying files from Windows Explorer. Gladinet Cloud Desktop also includes scheduled backup features.
As shown in the following mount virtual directory wizard, you can pick either Rackspace Cloud Files (default US) or Rackspace Cloud Files (UK). The concept here is that you will have a locally attached virtual network drive and you will mount Rackspace Cloud Files account as a virtual folder. If you have multiple accounts, you can mount multiple times.

Use Google Docs Versioning from Desktop

Google Docs has a nice versioning feature that allows you to keep a change list of what you have done to the files. It is a very convenient feature when you are collaborating on a file with colleagues.
Gladinet Cloud Desktop has been supporting Google Docs since 2008. It allows users to upload and download Google Docs files from their Windows Explorer directly, just like using a local drive. It provides a greatly simplified migration path for users to move to Google Docs. So users can batch move files and folders from local drive and local NAS device to Google Docs.
After user moves files to Google Docs, the next step naturally is to share and collaborate with colleagues. Now adding versioning support from Desktop is an important feature addition for users to collaborate directly from local applications such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop and etc.
This article will describe the Google Docs versioning support from Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

Step 1 – Mount Google Docs as Network Drive

First make sure you have your Google Docs account mounted and it is showing up on Windows Explorer.

OpenStack Storage with an Access Solution

There are more and more customers and potential partners that are installing OpenStack storage. We saw the questions coming from Gladinet forum and coming from support email (support@gladinet.com). Earlier the year, we saw Internap XIPCloud went live. This quarter, we saw KT ucloud storage too. There are also quite some customers setting up internal OpenStack storage and doing proof of concepts. These customers have contacted Gladinet for the cloud storage access solutions.
You have OpenStack swift storage? We can help deliver to customer’s desktop and file servers. You have a channel to reach out to these potential cloud storage customers? We have the solution for them to use!
The open source nature of the OpenStack project is fueling the adoption. Many of the customers contacted Gladinet with a very small OpenStack instance to start with.
During a typical sales call with OpenStack storage, we cover these 5 basic cloud storage use cases.
1. Backup to OpenStack Cloud Storage

Amazon S3 as a Team Network Drive

Amazon S3 is getting more and more popular with Small and Medium sized Businesses(SMBs). These SMBs typically have mobile workers and office workers. They are looking for a cloud drive solution for a team of users.
The earlier solutions from Gladinet requires the Amazon S3 master account holder to share the account credentials with the team so each team member can mount the same Amazon S3 account and buckets, thus they can all use the same cloud drive.
With the latest version from Gladinet, it is now possible to integrate and leverage the Amazon Identity and Account Management (IAM) feature so each team member can have a set of unique credentials and get assigned a special bucket to use, while the account master keeps the mater account secrets to himself.

Desktop Backup to Google Storage

Google Storage (Google Storage for Developers) has been on the market for a long time now. It functions very much like Amazon S3. It can be an excellent online backup storage.
This article discuss how to setup Google Storage as an online backup target, allowing you to access files both locally and from Google Storage’s online Google Storage Manager.
First you will need to sign up for Google Storage. If you have a Google account already, all that you need to do is to activate it.

During the activation process, you will need to enable the Google Storage access and also setup billing information through Google Checkout.