TheSMESpace Blog

We have some really exciting things lined up for the New Year, one of which is the re-launch of the site with a new look and feel, and the other is some fantastic new ways you can use SMEStorage. We are currently mid way through developing out Mac and Linux virtual drives and expect both of them to be available before the end of January.

These virtual drives will map onto your underlying clouds just as the windows version does. This will mean that you can double click into the virtual drive and access up to 10 different storage clouds depending on your package.

A screenshot of the Mac version in use can be seen below:

In the meantime all that remains is to wish you all a happy festive season and thanks for your support over 2009 .

We have updated our multi cloud storage API manual to version 0.7. Our multi-cloud API provides a single rest based interface to access over 10 cloud providers including Amazon S3, Microsoft SkyDrive, RackSpace Cloud Files, Mobile Me, Box.net + more.


This update has now had more detailed examples added as to the request and response of each of the API functions.


All our client tools are built on this API, as is our forthcoming iPhone application which should be in the App store in January.


In January, as well as this REST based API, we will be putting on Google Code a complete library of .Net classes that provide the same API functionality but in C#.We will also release the Objective C libraries used to build the iPhone application at a later date.



SMEStorage multi-cloud API Manual 0.7 -

A recent study by the University of California in San Diego called “How much information?” points to the speed of modern life as being 2.3 words per second, or about 100,000 words per day.

Due to emails, texting, internet surfing, RSS, reading, and other media we are being deluged by more and more information, in fact the equivalence of 34 gigabytes of information each day.

Here at SMEStorage, we are not surprised. We see and hear everyday from our users how much information they have to process and store. This information is not stored in one place. It is in email, in instant messages, on social sites, on different free storage clouds, on RSS and more.

It was this realisation that led to us creating our virtualised cloud storage platform which ties together a view of data held on email, data clouds, and social storage clouds, enabling you to view, manage, and share this data from one file tree.

It is clear that the volume of data a user has access to and has to manage will only get worse, not better. To this end, our comittment is that we will continue to broaden our services to support more data, social, and other more non traditional data stores.

We’ll continue to provide innovative features and services, such as our unique Cloud-to-Cloud sync, and we have some great things coming up for 2010, so watch this space !

Recently our founder did a presentation at Skillsmatter in London on the state of Public Cloud Storage. The slides for this can be viewed below, and the video presentation can be view on the Skillsmatter site.

We are sponsoring the UK Governments Government IT Cloud initiative next year. The UK Government advocated a creation of a Cloud Computing initiative called “GCloud” which is both an infrastructure as well as a collection of reusable assets/applications that various government institutions can leverage. This was outlined in their Digital Britain report. 

The Government IT event being held on 28th January is the first step towards this and we are proud to be sponsoring and associated with this event.

In the last few hours we suffered from a sustained Denial of Service attached in our servers which manifested itself as a particularly nasty SYN attack. The attach was a pretty new method of trying up resources and it took us a little while to isolate the attack and then apply some measures at the hardware level to ensure this particular form of attack is catered for in the future.

Thanks for bearing with us !

Similar to the WordPress plug-in we released that enables you to share files stored on various cloud files, we have also now done a similar plug-in for Joomla. The plug-in will enable you to share  your cloud files on your Joomla site.


How does this work ? SMEStorage provides a  gateway in which we sync your file meta-data but all files continue to reside on your storage platform. In this way we are able to offer value added services and clients to your existing storage provider, and provide a single cloud file system which enables you to manage all you files in one file tree.


One of the many value added services we provide is the ability to share files. There are many ways to do this, including RSS, email, Twitter, URL with Private contacts etc, and the Joomla plug-in is now another way.  Also note that files that have been made public, and can therefore be shared on Joomla, can still be encrypted, so you can have private files publically available that you can choose ony to share with your userbase.


To get started, download and install the plug-in, and then register for an account on SMEStorage. Select the account that matches your cloud provider. In the process of setting your account up you will do a file meta-data sync and your files will then be available in the Cloud File Manager. From the File manager you can choose to make the file public. This post steps through how to do just that. Once the file is public you can choose to make it visibile on your Joomla site.


If you want to encrypt your files then upload them via SMEStorage to your cloud provider of choice and choose encryption at the point of upload. Don’t worry if your underlhying cloud provider does not support encryption it does not need to. Remember your password for the file though as we don’t keep it ! Once the file is uploaded to your cloud provider via the SMEStorage cloud gateway you can make it public and it will be available just like any other file.

We were excited when we read about the Simple Cloud API from Zend. An interoperable Cloud API accessible via PHP was something we were keen to see if we could integrate it’s storage API with our own Multi-Cloud API which is based on REST but which has different language examples and bindings, including PHP.


After examining the SimpleCloud API it is clear to us that the storage API piece, as is, was limited compared to our own multi-cloud storage API whose aim is to provide an abstraction layer with file system functionality coupled with service functionality, such as the ability to backup email, backup contacts from social clouds, provide cloud sync and failover capabilities, encryption facilities etc. The Simple Cloud API is focused on providing access to clouds, with simple Create, Read, Delete functionality, and does not necessarily abstract the way the clouds are accessed or manipulated. 


There are two ways in which we could integrate with Zend. We could take advantage of their libraries to add support for clouds supported by the SimpleCloud API that we do not support, or we could integrate in a way that enables the SimpleCloud API to take advantage of the 10 plus clouds we support, by providing our own SimpleCloud SMEStorage plug-in.


It looks as there will be a fair bit of work to take advantage of the SimpleCloud API in our architecture.  The Current version of the SimpleCloud API doesn’t allow the streaming downloading of files. This would require us to create a set of classes that will extend the Simple Cloud classes and would have new methods related to streaming downloading and other methods that will return some information to use with streaming upload. There are other issues also, such as limitations on listing all buckets in S3. It only works with the bucket that the user provides in the settings.


Despite all of this the SImpleCloud API will be here to stay so we intend to move forward with our integration to it, and it is on our roadmap. 


Stay tuned !

We’ve released the second of our WordPressPlug-Ins which enables users of different Cloud Storage Providers  to make files available for download on a WordPress Blog.


The extension supports all the clouds that are available via the SMEStorage Gateway API which include Amazon S3, RackSpace Cloud Files, Box.net, Microsoft SkyDrive, MobileMe, GMail-as-a-Cloud, Email-as-a-Cloud, FTP-as-a-Cloud, and any WebDav compatible storage Cloud.


To enable your files to be shared on the WordPress Blog you need to make the files public within SMEStorage:


1. Use the SMEStorage File Manager to navigate to select files to make public. Please read this blog post for more information on how to do this. Files set to be public can then be made available from the Plug-In.


2. Login in to WP-Admin. At the bottom of your dasboard on the right hand side you will a ‘SMEStorage Public Files option’. Click on this. Here you can enter your SMEStorage username and how you want the files to be selected for display i.e. via tags you have assigned to them or * for all public files.


3. Now go to Appearance-Widgets and choose where you want the widget displaying your files to be.


The Plug-In was developed using the SMEStorage multi-cloud API.


The Plug-In is available for download from the WordPress extensions site.

One of the added benefits of the Microsoft Live SkyDrive support that we recently announced is thatit becomes accessible via the SMEStorage rich multi-cloud API becomes available for developers who want to access Microsoft Live SkyDrive programmtically. On the API’s Google Code site, as well as a detailed manual, there are PHP, PERL, and .Net examples and sample applications, and soon there will follow fully featured .Net & Cocoa libraries. Remember also, that the sames API also supports Amazon S3, Box.net, RackSpace Cloud Files, MobileMe, WebDav, Gmail Clouds, Email Clouds, FTP Clouds as well as Google Docs and Evernote. Expect to see support for at least two more storage clouds before the end of the year.


Many of the above storage clouds not only lack a proper file system (file support, but no folders, with only basic operations) but some, such as MobileMe, SkyDrive, GMail etc, lack any sort of API at all. That’s why we built the SMEStorage Multi-Cloud File System. We built it to enable us to have a universal API to support the storage clouds we plugged into our platform for our own purposes. Indeed it is what all our client tools are based on.


Given that is it is proven and more feature rich than the alternatives we made the decision to make it available as a generic storage cloud API for those wishing to use the SMEStorage platform as a Gateway to support multiple Cloud platforms in their applications or services. It supports multiple connections and multiple users and it does not impact the actual files themsevles as they are still stored on the original cloud service. SMEStorage merely keeps information about the metadata of the files and enables a file system, with services, on top of the remote storage cloud.


In the case of SkyDrive the lack of an API means our implementation is tightly coupled to Microsoft’s web implementation. Any major changes could render the API temporarily inoperable, but we are committed to make the necessary changes to continue support of this Cloud Provider as we move forward in our pursuit of supporting all major storage clouds.