Cloud Storage setup - Ldap/Single Sign On/WebDAV etc?

[burgemaster]

Hi,

I am looking as a project for the summer to setup a managed cloud-space for students and staff.

Some staff have asked for their own dropbox accounts to be used in school etc but i need a managed solution.

I have looked into OwnCloud and even setup our own but want to go a step further. I am looking for a solution (doesn't have to be owncloud) that can possibly forfill the followIng:

 

1) The content needs to be managed in-house - doesn't need to be stored in-house as long as we can make sure the content is appropriate.

2) Their cloud storage can be mapped as a network drive - if webdav, can this be scripted? LDAP etc? We cant/dont want students to have to enter their credentials.

3) They can save directly to their cloud space (again without logging in) from Office 2013.

 

Any suggestions please? Anyone already set this up?

Sharepoint, OwnCloud, Google docs, 365, HAP?

Edited May 18, 2013 by burgemaster

[dhicks]

2) Their cloud storage can be mapped as a network drive - if webdav, can this be scripted? LDAP etc? We cant/dont want students to have to enter their credentials.

3) They can save directly to their cloud space (again without logging in) from Office 2013.

 

Is this just from school, or from home too? If just from school, then you're probabaly best off with just a mapped drive. Kind of the point of a cloud solution is that it can scale to very large sizes, but you then have to have a layer in the middle somewhere that converts the cloud HTTP API calls to look like a mounted file system. I'm guessing that you want a client that supports the Amazon S3 API, then you can use any cloud system that supports S3 (OwnCloud, OpenStack or Eucalyptus). OwnCloud does seem to have a good selection of sync clients:

 

Sync Clients | ownCloud.org

 

although I'm not sure they operate via the S3 API. OpenStack seems to have the best S3 support, although I've not tried any of these yet.

[dhicks]

I'm guessing that you want a client that supports the Amazon S3 API, then you can use any cloud system that supports S3 (OwnCloud, OpenStack or Eucalyptus).

 

Sorry, getting myself confused - looking at it in a bit more detail, OwnCloud is more of a personal file store (it supports the S3 API, but from the client side, so you can mount some S3 storage and syc your files to it via the provided client applications). I'm more interested in my own Amazon-like cloud, but on a smaller scale (I want to test my own client-side storage code). Eucalyptus seems like my best option, I'm now downloading the Cloud-in-a-box ISO to install on one server. OpenStack seems to have rather bigger minimum system requirements - you seem to need two servers, one with 32GB of RAM, which is a bit much.

[markwilfan]

From looking at it own cloud seems more appropriate, the others are proper cloud services for hosting cloud applications and pooling processing power as well as storage