One of the core benefits of the Filer is its tight integration with the Microsoft Windows platform. This is not due to any Windows “bias” on the part of our company or team. It’s a business reality: Most enterprises run Windows. Apple OSX and Linux are both steadily gaining ground, but you have to have good, solid integration with Windows to succeed in the marketplace.
This is why we offered such good integration in our first version: for security we fully supported Active Directory (and its ACLs), share creation, etc. We spend most of our time testing and proving the product in Windows, so we have been confident in our level of support.
But as this series has pointed out, we’re always challenging ourselves to find places to improve, especially when customers make specific requests. So, for this post I’ll be covering a small group of features that we feel will greatly increase our Windows integration and make the overall experience that much better for our users.
First up, we’re releasing support for Windows DFS (Distributed File System). This is a Windows technology many IT people are already familiar with – it allows administrators to organize many CIFS shares under a single logical network path, and it became a standard feature in Windows Server 2003 and above.
Adding the Filer to a DFS namespace is pretty simple. All you need is a DFS namespace already set up (in my case, “dfs-demo”) and a Filer joined to the Active Directory domain. Then you add the desired share from the Filer as a folder target:
Client machines can easily browse or type in the address of the new DFS share:
They can then access the Filer share as needed, and see all existing files and folders:
Second, we’ve added a new section to the UI under the “Shares” tab called “Connected Clients”:
Here you’ll be able to see all the clients who are actively connected to the Filer. This is very useful information if you need to do share administration or apply system updates. In the example below, we’ve mapped a Filer share (named “files”) from our Windows 7 host:
And we can now see it appear in the “Connected Clients” page:
So, we show which share the client is connected to, as well as the hostname of the client. And, of course, if we connect from a different host - say, a Mac OSX workstation - we can see that client appear as well:
Finally, we’re unveiling support for a pretty killer feature for Windows end-users (not just administrators): Windows previous versions. For those of you unfamiliar with this feature, certain versions of Windows (our test platform is Windows 7) support the Volume Shadow Copy service. When this is enabled (by default on Windows 7) you can right-click on a file and select the “Restore Previous Versions” option to browse past versions of that file.
When users do this through a mapped Filer share in the upcoming release of the Filer, they will automatically see previous versions of files located in the Filer. What’s even cooler is that these versions only represent snapshots (performed by the Filer) in which data actually changed. Each version in the previous versions tab directly corresponds to a snapshot in the cloud of your data.
This means that as your file working set is modified, the list of versions will be updated and populated based on the Filer’s snapshot schedule. This also means that end users can, as needed, self-restore old versions if they need to. For example, I’ve been editing this blog post using Microsoft Word 2010 directly to the Filer. As I’ve been editing, the Filer has been creating new snapshots. The result is that multiple versions keep appearing:
What’s great about this is that it empowers your users. They can perform their own restores, natively, on their machines. Some applications – such as Microsoft Word 2010 - even have some level of knowledge/integration with this feature.
Now for the killer feature within the killer feature. The history, and the “previous versions” support, is maintained through a delete. If you delete a file, and it is later restored by an administrator through our restore UI, the history you had on that file before the delete is preserved.
Overall, these three features further help our rapidly growing Windows support and integration. And there are still more Windows/Microsoft related features coming out in this release I haven’t covered yet. We’ll get to those soon!
In the meantime, if you have feedback or questions, please email us at feedback@nasuni.com or sound off in the comments.
If you’re excited about these features – why wait to start using the Filer, if you sign up today you’ll get immediate access to all of the features discussed in this series the second we release. Sign up today and use the coupon code “Summer 2010” when subscribing, and you’ll get 10% seasonal discount off the subscription price!
Other posts in this series: