Cloud based storage for a company

dangerman

hi,

Investigating solutions for my company - basically (think) I'm looking for a drop box for enterprise.

- We'd all have a mounted drive in windows, in all our small offices around the world, but that drive would actually connect to a very fast cloud based file storage.

Are there all-in-one solutions for this? Or is it a case that we have to hack it together with amazon S3 and some scripts etc?

Any ideas appreciated.

bhickey

Have you looked at Box.net

Also for Google Apps, there are some products here

woolymammoth

how much storage are you talking here? and what type of files, mostly?

The likes of amazon would be good since they have a couple of clusters around the globe, inc. Dublin, and there's clients available. If you're just dealing with documents, office 365 (when it's released) could be a good option too, also based in dublin. If it's not a huge amount, dropbox would be a great option. The new RC of dropbox allows selective folder sync, so i guess every office could have their own folder and not always sync with everyone elses.

ronkmonster

Not sure if it's suited for business use but Wuala is similar to dropbox but you get a mounted drive to access your data (as well as a client application).

http://www.wuala.com/

dangerman

woolymammoth wrote: »

how much storage are you talking here? and what type of files, mostly?

The likes of amazon would be good since they have a couple of clusters around the globe, inc. Dublin, and there's clients available. If you're just dealing with documents, office 365 (when it's released) could be a good option too, also based in dublin. If it's not a huge amount, dropbox would be a great option. The new RC of dropbox allows selective folder sync, so i guess every office could have their own folder and not always sync with everyone elses.

Large files and lots of them: word docs, ppts, all on the large/very large size and then a large amount of video, PSDs, the works. 40+ people in a growing company.

It really doesn't work does it? You should have local storage and back it up / sync it with S3 for the remote offices?

bhickey

dangerman wrote: »

It really doesn't work does it? You should have local storage and back it up / sync it with S3 for the remote offices?

The only thing about S3 is how the hell do you work out how much it's all really going to cost before it's too late?

woolymammoth

dangerman wrote: »

40+ people in a growing company.

i reckon this is a comment you'll want to consider further. Ultimately, we can name all the fancy online storage of the day, but only you have a good idea of what your current file storage situation is, office locations, and potential for growth is! I'm pretty sure Amazon have a highly complicated tool for figuring the costs out.


yep here it is

brianwalshcork

I just used Woolymammoth's link to get an idea of the Amazon pricing - horribly expensive!

What is the total volume of data? and the usage profile? i.e. do you have 1 TB of data, but your only editing a small subset of that every day?

If you have IP connectivity between the sites though a VPN etc, then what about direct file syncronization & replication software to keep local copies of the files at each site, that way the users will always be accessing at LAN speeds.

ERS_Conor

Have you looked at SharePoint?

We have a blog on it here: SharePoint Blog

woolymammoth

ERS_Conor wrote: »

Have you looked at SharePoint?

We have a blog on it here: SharePoint Blog

i hate sharepoint. It doesn't make a good store for data (DATA, not ms office documents!!!) in my opinion.

but if it's a route you're considering, then look into hosted sharepoint as part of office 365. With it, each user is allocated 500MB. however, storage is pooled amongst everyone, so if you have 10 users, you collectively have 5GB. 40 peoples would have 20GB.. and so on.. Plus, The hosted suites remove a lot of headache with hardware, licencing, configuration, backups.. etc.

many companies make a living off using amazon storage, so it can't be that expensive, is it? Compared to renting your own rack space and hosting your own storage i mean..

Boskonay

There are lots of cloud storage options - box.net or dropbox offer a nice simple alternative to a local nas or fileshare.

HTH,
Stephen

_______________
www.dediserve.com

woolymammoth

OP, was just reading this yesterday, may be worth a look. Interesting even if it doesn't suit your needs!

http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/12/14/cyberduck-brings-ftp-webdav-s3-and-google-docs-transfers-to-windows/