Google Drive inside Desktop Virtualization

An interesting use case came up recently. It is an university environment, with two popular technologies involved in the setup. One is VDI – Desktop Virtualization. The other is Google Drive.
Desktop virtualization provides an easy to manage way for universities to deploy desktops to students. Most of the students have their own device such as laptop. With VDI, the students can run a virtual desktop loaded with university-licensed software for class related activities.
Google Drive provides an easy way for students to store class related materials and projects. Most of the students have Google Drive installed on their laptop so the class materials can stay inside Google Drive.
Problem arises when students want to access Google Drive inside the virtual desktop. The Google Drive’s full-two-way sync operating mode doesn’t work well inside Virtual Desktop because the virtual desktop gets recycled when the student’s session is over. Full two-way sync is time and resource consuming and not necessary.
A random access network drive mapping will be a better access.  In this case, Gladinet drive mapping technology, integrated with Google Drive API works well in this environment.
To give it a try, you can install Gladinet Cloud Desktop Professional inside the virtual desktop and save as a snapshot image.

Convert Local Storage to Cloud Storage

There are many ways to convert local storage to cloud storage. For small data size, some will just do a simple drag and drop upload. For medium data size, some will setup two-way sync to cloud storage.
For large data set, above methods are not practical because it takes a long time to transfer data from local to cloud.  Some service providers provide bulk injection, allowing you to mail storage media like a hard drive to them and they will do the conversion in their data center.
This article will discuss a way that can achieve bulk injection-like effect (so data is immediately available) but without mailing out your hard drive.
As a summary, you will need a Gladinet Cloud team account. After that you will install Gladinet clients such as Gladinet Cloud Desktop on Desktop PCs or Gladinet Cloud Server on file servers.  From the Gladinet clients, you can then attach local folder to your Gladinet Cloud account. Gladinet clients and the Gladinet web service collaborate to create a virtual link for the data to flow.  The attached local folder will be immediately available as if it was part of the cloud storage.
Now here is the detailed steps. First acquire a Gladinet Team account from www.gladinet.com

After it is done, you will be at the web portal of your own account.

OpenStack Swift Client with KeyStone Support

If you are setting up OpenStack Swift Object Storage, you may need a quick and easy way to connect to your OpenStack Swift instance, such as a desktop client, with the possibility of mapping a network drive to your OpenStack Swift container.
This article discusses Gladinet Cloud Desktop client and how it can be used to connect to OpenStack Swift cloud storage, with KeyStone support.
You will first install Gladinet Cloud Desktop professional or starter edition.  At the end of the installation, it will ask you to mount at least one cloud storage.

Gladinet Cloud Desktop Professional/Starter

There are two entries related to OpenStack Swift KeyStone. One entry is shown above. The other is shown below.

Cloud-Based Distributed File System

Distributed File System (DFS) in the context of Microsoft Windows is a very familiar feature for Windows Server administrators. As a summary, it can organize many distributed SMB file shares into a single DFS namespace (DFS root), providing location transparency and redundancy.

In the cloud storage era, we can extend the distributed file system concept to cloud storage. With cloud storage, it is possible to unify your multiple file servers from multiple sites into one single namespace. Gladinet Cloud is one such namespace that can unify all your servers from different places and provide cloud-storage replication for redundancy.
If you were a Windows administrator, you will start building your DFS at creating a DFS root first, then you will bring in different SMB network shares into your DFS tree. In Gladinet, you will start by creating a Gladinet Team Edition account, with default Gladinet Storage, or plugin your own cloud storage account, such as Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files and etc..

Mount a File Share with Amazon S3

Many clients want to use Amazon S3 directly, and yet want to make it transparent to the users. As far as the administrator or the CTO is concerned, he wants to have direct control of the Amazon S3 account that his company is using. At the same time, he wants the employees in the company using the company Amazon S3 account transparently without any additional learning curve.
This article documents many ways you can use Gladinet solutions to get it done. We will divide the use case into big, medium, small. Three use cases. Each use case may have a different matching solution.

Big Use Case

You have multi-site file structure and you have a need to setup team folder, version folder, web-based access, mobile device access,  in addition to mounting file share to your amazon s3 account.
In this case, the best fit is Gladinet Cloud Team Edition, with your Amazon S3 account plugged in as the root folder of your company cloud drive. At www.gladinet.com, you can select Team Edition, then select plugin my own account and then Amazon S3.

Use Cloud Storage to Unify Multi-Site File Structure

Cloud Storage is great for IT administrators trying to maintain file structure across multiple sites. File Structure from one site can be attached to the cloud so it can be viewed and used from the other sites.
This is a use case we learned from a Gladinet customer. Gladinet Cloud and Gladinet Cloud Server helpped to reduce the file structure on 3 different sites down to one.
This article will review this use case and the basic setup. Assuming you are in the role of an IT admin, managing file servers from 3 different sites and your job is to make sure all 3 servers are available to all 3 sites.

Gladinet Team Account

First you will need a Gladinet Team account. When you log into your Gladinet Cloud account from the web browser, you will see the root of your “Gladinet Cloud Drive”, which is also your global namespace. Later when you have folders attached from your 3 file servers, they will show up in this namespace. Conceptually, this is similar to the DFS (distributed file system) root.

Local File Server + Cloud-Based Team Folder

Local File Server for team collaboration is a very familiar use case. Typically a local IT administrator set up a file server in a Local Area Network(LAN) environment, such  as in a branch office. The whole office then use network shares to share files. For example, below is a picture of a Shared folder in Windows File Server 2008. The local folder’s name is TeamFolderLocal and it is published as a network share.

Cloud-based team folder is also a very familiar use case. In Gladinet Cloud, the administrator can setup a team folder so anyone that has assigned read/write permission can access the team folder. Below is a picture of a team folder inside web browser.

Both use cases are pretty common. Now, what if the two use cases can be merged into one? If you have a locally shared network share, can you make it into a team folder shared inside web browser? On the other hand, if you have a team folder inside web browser, can you make it into a network share on file server?
Gladinet Cloud Server is the middle ware that bridges the team folder use case both ways.