Cloud Hosting Journal

Storage at Cloud Expo

In the IT departments of many companies around the world, data volume is growing exponentially. Every day, companies gather more and more data to meet business and regulatory requirements. This challenge is often met with the  purchase of more and more servers with more and more disks. This creates a data management nightmare which is not only unwieldy but expensive.

It is also unsustainable. Fortunately, there are solutions in the cloud. With the introduction of support for any file type in Google Storage, it is now possible to satisfy the storage needs of your IT department with Google Storage.

Sounds good, but it introduces another problem: it may not be so easy to upload your existing data which may be stored on FTP servers, WebDav servers, and a variety of other file servers. There may even be data stored in other cloud storage services that may be cheaper to house in Google Storage given its industry leading low cost of $.25 per gigabyte per year.

More good news: Gladinet Cloud Desktop makes it incredibly easy to consolidate your data to Google Docs. After installing Gladinet, you can mount storage from many providers, including FTP and WebDav as folders on a local drive. Once this is done, these folders show up in Windows Explorer as shown below:

Now files can be transferred into Google Docs with a simple drag and drop. For example, after dragging the FTP folder to the Google Docs folder, the following window pops up:

This allows you to specify the schedule for the upload. The task can be performed immediately in the background, or scheduled to run during off hours, or as a recurring task that is allotted a certain time frame.

After the schedule has been defined for each upload, progress can be monitored in the Gladinet Management Console as shown below:

Here we see that there are two uploads of thousands of tasks from a WebDav server and an FTP server into Google Storage. And we could have done the same for a local folder or files stored by another provider.

For those who need to move data into the cloud for consolidation or any other reason, migration doesn’t get much easier than that!