file server in the cloud...?

[joseph]

One year ago, we started moving our services to the cloud. The first one was the support ticket system. We chose zendesk and for a very reasonable price it's working very well. After, it was the email, after years using mdaemon, google offered us a free version of google apps which saved us tones of time and money...

 

Now we are thinking on moving the file server to the cloud, or at least to have some kind of hybrid system so staff and students can access the files in the file server from anywhere and at the same time we don't have to worry about backups. I have checked various solutions which looks interesting like box and egnyte but they are really expensive even with the educational discount. We only need about 1 or 2 TB which is the size of our current file server...

 

So please if you have done something similar I would be really grateful if you could share your experience with me.

 

Best regards,

[irsprint84]

Is it a secure transfer? video/ music file transfer? is your line 100% up?

[MatthewL]

Personally I would keep file server in house, just my opinion. I think you would run into issues putting it in the cloud.

[joseph]

but in the case that we keep it @home, we would need to publish somehow the files to make them available for students and teachers.... something simpler than vpn

[bart21]

I would keep something like a file server in house.

 

The amount of data this contains, if your Internet connection goes down no-one can access their files.

 

Whereas with internally hosted file storage if internet is down people can still access their files. (providing the network is up)

 

nick

[maniac]

If you kept your existing file server you can grant access to your existing data via an SSL VPN using an appliance like this Barracuda SSL VPN - Secure Remote Access From Any Web Browser which allows (amongst other things) file access via webDAV so users can access their data remotely using their network username and password to authenticate with.

 

The barracuda product is based on the old opensource SSL explorer from 3SP which I used to use at a school years ago to do exactly the same thing - it worked brilliantly.

 

I know it uses the word 'VPN' in the name, but it's different to a traditional IPsec VPN in that the whole thing is based on the SSL protocol so it will work in any browser and doesn't need dedicated software or complex authentication.

 

Mike.

Edited May 27, 2011 by maniac

[teejay]

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/home-access-plus/59485-home-access-plus.html

[joseph]

Thank you all for your replies I'll check HAP+ and Barracuda SSL VPN

 

[dhicks]

Now we are thinking on moving the file server to the cloud, or at least to have some kind of hybrid system so staff and students can access the files in the file server from anywhere and at the same time we don't have to worry about backups.

 

It sounds more like you want offsite backup of some kind and local access to your file server. WebDAV might be a good option for file access - the client capability is built in to Windows XP onwards, and the server capability is built in to Apache (and probably IIS). There are many offsite backup services available (Backblaze seems to be good, although I haven't used them myself), although it strikes me that schools are in the perfect position to simply team up with another school in the same LEA and each agree to backup each other's data.

 

If there are issues opening up a connection through your firewall to your file server, you could replicate your files to a hosting service via rsync.

[CyberNerd]

google apps is essentially a fileserver in the cloud.There are third party tools to display it as a mapped network drive

GLADINET - Cloud Storage Access Platform & Solutions

 

it supports

Amazon S3

Synaptic Storage as a ServiceSM

Box.net

Caringo CAStor

EMC Atmos Online

FTP

File Server Share

Google Docs

Google Storage

Internap XIPCloud Storage

Mezeo

Nirvanix

OpenStack

Peer1 CloudOne

Rackspace CloudFiles

Windows Live SkyDrive

Windows Azure

WebDav

SDK Custom Plugin

[rbance]

One year ago, we started moving our services to the cloud. The first one was the support ticket system. We chose zendesk and for a very reasonable price it's working very well. After, it was the email, after years using mdaemon, google offered us a free version of google apps which saved us tones of time and money...

 

Now we are thinking on moving the file server to the cloud, or at least to have some kind of hybrid system so staff and students can access the files in the file server from anywhere and at the same time we don't have to worry about backups. I have checked various solutions which looks interesting like box and egnyte but they are really expensive even with the educational discount. We only need about 1 or 2 TB which is the size of our current file server...

 

So please if you have done something similar I would be really grateful if you could share your experience with me.

 

Best regards,

 

Live@EDU??? that works....

[rbance]

One year ago, we started moving our services to the cloud. The first one was the support ticket system. We chose zendesk and for a very reasonable price it's working very well. After, it was the email, after years using mdaemon, google offered us a free version of google apps which saved us tones of time and money...

 

Now we are thinking on moving the file server to the cloud, or at least to have some kind of hybrid system so staff and students can access the files in the file server from anywhere and at the same time we don't have to worry about backups. I have checked various solutions which looks interesting like box and egnyte but they are really expensive even with the educational discount. We only need about 1 or 2 TB which is the size of our current file server...

 

So please if you have done something similar I would be really grateful if you could share your experience with me.

 

Best regards,

 

live@edu is one answer at a good price for schools....

[Michael]

One year ago, we started moving our services to the cloud. The first one was the support ticket system. We chose zendesk and for a very reasonable price it's working very well. After, it was the email, after years using mdaemon, google offered us a free version of google apps which saved us tones of time and money...

 

Now we are thinking on moving the file server to the cloud, or at least to have some kind of hybrid system so staff and students can access the files in the file server from anywhere and at the same time we don't have to worry about backups. I have checked various solutions which looks interesting like box and egnyte but they are really expensive even with the educational discount. We only need about 1 or 2 TB which is the size of our current file server...

 

So please if you have done something similar I would be really grateful if you could share your experience with me.

 

Best regards,

 

Accessing a support desk and e-mail, is just like any other website. Accessing files over the internet is a lot more demanding on resources (especially your internet connection). Depending on the number of users, you could argue the price of a 100Mbps or even 1000Mbps internet connection, it's still going to be considerably cheaper to host your server on site.

 

There's also the issue of security. Encrypting data uses up even more bandwidth and no matter how good any company claims their cloud is, you still need a backup system. To my knowledge no cloud company guarantees data protection, redundancy or uptime. These are certainly considerations to bear in mind as when things go wrong, you'll be expected to fix it. There's also the issue of who owns the data on a cloud hosted service and this is why the Cloud Computing Act is something worth reading!