Category Archives: Dropbox

And Cloud Storage will make us even stranger

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It was a dark and stormy night ….

I was in a car with my host in the stifling traffic jams on the streets of Jakarta. We had just finished dinner and his driver was taking me back to the hotel. It was about 9pm and we were making conversation trying to figure out how we can work together. My host, a wonderful Singaporean who has been residing in Jakarta for more than a decade and a half, owns a distributorship focusing mainly on IT security solutions. He had invited me over to Jakarta to give a talk on Cloud Storage at the Indonesia CIO Network event on January 9th 2013.

I was there to represent SNIA South Asia to give a talk about CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface), and my host also took the opportunity to introduce Nutanix, a SAN-less 2-tier, high-performance, virtualized data center platform. (Note: That’s quite a mouthful, but gotta include all the buzz-words in there). It was my host’s first foray into storage networking solutions, away from his usual security solutions spread. As the conversation went on in the car, he said “You storage guys are so strange!“.

To many of the IT folks who have been involved in OS, applications, security, and networking, to say a few, storage is like a dark art, some mumbo jumbo, voodoo-like science known to a select few. That’s great, because this perception will keep us relevant, and still have the value and a job. To me, that just fine and dandy, and I like it that way. 🙂

In preparation to the event, I have to learn up SNIA CDMI. Cloud and Storage … Cloud and Storage … Cloud and Storage. Hmmm …. Continue reading →

Feed us with Filr

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I have checked about the progress of Novell Filr, which has generated a lot of buzz on the web. I blogged about it here and here and I was hoping to get a job to review the product. But I didn’t get the job yet, because the product will only be available in Q4 of 2012.

That’s a long time to come to market, considering that from the time it was announced in Novell BrainShare in November 2011. And the competitors are gearing up as well. There is Dropbox for the enterprise called Dropbox for Teams, and VMware is doing something along the same lines called Project Octopus. I am pretty sure there are plenty of other vendors who are already offering something equivalent to what the Novell Filr can do.

I browsed around the web for more info about the Novell Filr, hoping that it won’t be like a blackhole after Novell’s announcement. Fortunately, I found more details which I thought was interesting but it took a while after 5 or 6 Google pages.

The set of slides I found belonged to Anthony Priestman of Novell. The slides started with the Novell Filr ease of installation.

  • Local Administrator/Password
  • Server Name
  • IP Address
  • Finalize the configuration with a browser

In a nutshell Novell Filr is a virtualization service. It virtualizes the backend NTFS shares, CIFS shares, identity management through Active Directory or Novell eDirectory, as well as access control and security to present a “merged-view” of files and folders from different disparate sources.

Going deeper, the Novell Filr becomes the orchestrator and broker, linking up the backend to the front end with ease and simplicity. Even though it sounds easy, the entire architecture and its implementation is complicated because there are so many components and services involved.

Therefore, to make file services and authentication services matters easy and simple should be considered genius, and we shall see how Novell Filr pans out when it is released. I have no doubt in my mind that it will be easy and simple.

Here’s a deeper look at the architecture:

The Filr integrates with both Novell eDirectory and Windows Active Directory for authentication and file access control. I

One of the new concepts is called File Spaces. This is great, because this is going to do away with drive letters that we are so used to in mapped drives concept in Windows. There is a running joke that the number of mapped drives in Windows will run out after the letter Z:.

File Spaces allows a simple folder to represent any Windows shares, NAS CIFS shares or Novell NSS volumes. This is based on UNC (Universal Naming Convention), so it is straightforward. File Spaces also allows users to right-click to share their files easily, probably similar to how you share Google Docs files when you want to invite team members to collaborate on files. And it will update you on notifications after files have been updated or modified. This ease-of-sharing, of course, is governed with higher, company-wide policies about file sharing, both internally and externally (across firewalls as well)

Both the most powerful feature of File Spaces is the ability to have a single, “merged-view” of all files and folders with all types of devices, from tablets, to smartphones to laptops. The slide below explains a bit of File Spaces “Merged Views”:

The view of files and folders will look like the following below:

The Novell Filr concept and technology is going to define the new file sharing, home and user directories landscape in IT. The archaic concept of mapped drives will slowly fade away, and the Filr will bring forth new frontiers of tight and secure enterprise user and resource management, but with the ease of use and simplicity of sharing concepts of social media. 

Some older implementations from Novell will eventually be replaced by Filr. iFolder, Netstorage, and QuickFinder will go the way of the dodos, while the next generation Filr will become the flagship of the new Novell.

This sounds dandy. Unfortunately, I personally am worried about how Novell’s new owner, Attachmate will be good to Novell. Right now, the future of Novell seems like business as usual but that’s not good. Novell has been losing mindshare and they had better make their stand with a strong product like Novell Filr.

Like I said earlier, the product is shipping in late of 2012. It was announced in late 2011. That’s a whole 12 months in which Novell could do much better by feeding the minds of followers of Novell Filr. Let them and people like me, learn more about the technology. Let us help spread the idea and word and keep the Novell Filr interests up and the fire burning until the launch date.

Dropbox – everyone literally dropping their pants

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I am not a DropBox user (yet)

But as far as users habits are concerned, Dropbox is literally on fire, and everyone is basically dropping their pants for them. Why? Because Dropbox solves a need that everyone of us has, and have been hoping someone else had a solution for it.

It all started when the founder, Drew Houston, was on a bus ride from Boston to New York. He wanted to work on the 4-hour bus journey, and he had his laptop. Unfortunately, he forgot his thumb drive where his work was and the Dropbox idea was born. Drew wrote some codes to allow him to access his files anywhere, with any device and as they say, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. And it did.

Together with his fellow MIT student, Arash Fedowsi, Drew Houston work on the idea and got funding after that. With a short history about 4 years, it has accumulated about 40 million users by June of 2011. They based their idea of “freemium”, a business model that works by offering a product or service free of charge (typically digital offerings such as software, content, games, web services or other) while charging a premium for advanced features, functionality, or related products and services. And it’s catching like wildfire.

So, how does Dropbox work? In my usual geeky ways, the diagram below should tell the story.

The Dropbox service works flawlessly with MacOS, Windows and Linux. And it has client apps for Apple iOS and Google Android. The copy of the files can be accessible anywhere by almost any device and this simplicity is what the beauty of Dropbox is all about.

In a deeper drive, Dropbox clients basically communicate with the Dropbox server/service in the “cloud” from literally anywhere. The requests for opening a file, reading or writing to it rides on the RESTful cacheable communication protocol encapsulated in the HTTP services. For more info, you can learn about the Dropbox API here.

More about Dropbox in the YouTube video below:

One of the concerns of the cloud is security and unfortunately, Dropbox got hit when they were exposed by a security flaw in June 2011. Between a period of almost 4 hours, after a Dropbox maintenance upgrade, a lot of users’ folders were viewable by everyone else. That was scary but given the freemium service, that is something the users have to accept (or is it?)

This wildfire idea is beginning to take shape in the enterprises as well, with security being the biggest things to address. How do you maintain simplicity and make the users less threatened but at the same time, impose security fences, data integrity and compliance for corporate responsibility? That’s the challenge IT has to face.

Hence, necessity is the mother of invention again. Given the requirement of enterprise grade file sharing and having IT to address the concerns about security, integrity, controls, compliance and so on and not to mention the growth magnitude of files in the organization, Novell, which I had mentioned in my earlier blog, will be introducing something similar by early next year in 2012. This will be the security-enhanced, IT-controlled, user-pleasing file sharing and file access solution called Novell Filr. There’s a set of presentation slides out there.

We could see the changing of the NAS landscape as well because the user experience is forcing IT to adapt to the changes. Dropbox is one of the pioneers in this new market space and we will see more copy-cats out there. What’s more important now is how the enterprise NAS will do the address this space?