Oxygen Cloud is bringing the private cloud to you!

logo-oxygen-cloud-1004x408About 2 weeks ago, I was asked to participate in a private beta of a new platform Oxygen Cloud is releasing today.  This new product, called the Oxygen Storage Connector allows you to use your own local storage for your oxygen cloud account.

 

Installation of the Storage Connector was very simple and straight forward.  You just run the setup program on the windows server you want to use.  Once this is done, you login through the web interface and point the system to the folder you want to use for your storage.  You can install this inside a virtual machine, or do like I did and put it on my home NAS server that runs windows server 2008 R2.  Just remember that you can’t install this on a computer running the oxygen cloud client as well.  More information on the setup process (and a download link) can be found here.

 

OxygenCloudStorageConnector01Once the setup is all done, you can then connect to the Oxygen Cloud website and inspect your cloud storage.  I immediately provisioned out 250GB for oxygen cloud and then went back to check the used space on my windows server.  To my surprise, my usage was only a couple of megabytes.  This means that it is setup as thin provisioning and won’t eat up all your storage right away.  The files inside the storage appear to be broken up into 513k chunks and it is not discernable (to the naked eye) what is stored there.

 

Usage of the Storage Connector is simple too.  Inside my “O” drive, is a new folder in which anything placed there is will be put on my new private cloud.  If your windows server is up and running, you will be able to sync new files to this storage space.  It really is just that simple and Oxygen Cloud has now given you the ability to use your personal storage with the oxygen cloud interface.

 

A couple of reasons why I like this product:

  • OxyCloud 042_1This is the first I’ve seen of a company offering a solution to host your own cloud storage with their public product.
  • This will help ease the mind of people who have concerns with keeping their data out in public or hybrid cloud as now you can control the security of the data-at-rest.
  • This allows you to get more than 5gb from your cloud storage (at the expense of using your own bandwidth)

 

I’d also like to see a couple of things come from this in the future of this product:

  • Detect users that are on a LAN (or WAN) connection to the storage so that the traffic doesn’t need to go out to the internet to sync.  This will allow near instant syncing when a customer is using oxygen cloud at the workplace.
  • Allow multiple instances of the cloud connector setup under the same storage profile so that data is backed up to multiple sites for HA and DR solutions.
  • Offer setups for MACs and Linux machines or create a virtual appliance that can have storage provisioned directly to it.

 

All in all I see great work here and you can download the Oxygen Storage Connector for windows here.

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