Everyone seems to be talking about EMC’s new private cloud collaboration offering Syncplicity. And why shouldn’t they be, from everything I’ve seen it looks like a great offering if you are looking to allow corporate users to easily and safely access their files anywhere and on any device while keeping your data stored on your own datacenter.
The basic idea is simple and elegant. It allows you to offer a service where your users can sync and share files across all the various platforms. How does it all work? You have four basic elements: client access, authentication, application nodes, and storage. The storage part of this picture is what sets this apart from the dropboxes of the world. On-premises infrastructure. Rather than pushing your data to an external provider you keep all your data on your own equipment in your datacenter. You’ve got two options for storing you’re files EMC Atoms and EMC Isilon. The second part of the puzzle is the application nodes, which are simply compute nodes acting as intermediary to the storage layer you’ve chosen. This application layer is never accessed direct but rather by a client.
The next layer is the client layer, which is what your end users use to actually access the files they have access to. The client allows you to upload and access files on your storage layer (via the application nodes) and stores them locally for offline access. The final layer is authentication. In this case authentication (and metadata) happens at Syncplicity’s site but will tie in to you’re single sign-on environment.
That is the nut and bolts of it. I’ve not used this product, but have used a competitor – Oxygen Cloud. Oxygen Cloud works basically the same way, but allows you to used EMC and non-EMC storage offering via NFS or CIFS.
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