Connected Data Transporter trumps public cloud for users

Seeking a file-sharing and collaboration tool that offered efficient, remote access to storage, Calvary Church and Look Photography recently switched to the Connected Data Transporter.

Calvary Church, which is based in Los Gatos, Calif., and has a congregation of 1,500, first adopted Dropbox to support more than 40 staff and volunteers that needed access to documents, photos and videos of church services.

"The hope was we could replace our internal storage with Dropbox," said Mark Yoder, IT administrator at Calvary Church. "We created a folder and people started to upload data, and it would sync to everyone's hard drive. There was no way to turn it off and it filled up the hard drives on people's small laptops."

Yoder said users had the option to access files via Dropbox's Web interface.

"The navigation was clunky, so people stopped using it," he said. "That was the issue."

Yoder switched to a Connected Data Transporter that holds 8.5 TB of capacity for its enterprise file sync-and-share needs. The Transporter now provides the church's staff and volunteers with local copies and off-site protection, with replication in a private cloud. The Connected Data Transporter system and software handle the library and folders, while the files can reside on local computers. One major benefit is it gives end users the ability to choose what files and data to sync, Yoder said.

"I can choose on a granular level what I want available on my folder," Yoder said.

Look Photography, an assignment-based firm based in Orange County, Calif., generates volumes of image content, along with an image archive of more than 20 TB of files that grow on average from 2 TB to 3 TB per year. Look photographers shoot anywhere between 400 to 800 images daily and the company handles more than 100,000 images for 127 stock agencies in 98 countries.

Look uses a Connected Data Transporter 75 private cloud appliance that stores 10 TB of its data. The Transporter gives photographers the ability to quickly start the post-production process by uploading photos on the road for retouching and posting.

Look initially tried traditional NAS with FTP file access with a NetGear ReadyNAS, but it required a full-time IT person to maintain. Eric Hernandez, owner of Look Photography, said he considers public cloud file storage, such as Dropbox and Box, too expensive.

"Every cloud service does the same thing and it's really annoying," Hernandez said. "You either pay for a bigger service offering or they will nickel and dime you for everything."