Cloud Storage Tools

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In this post I am going to second what Remy wrote in Windows Azure Storage Made Easy, and will add one more tool as well as my own experience and preferred choice. Here is the list of the tools I looked at:

• CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob Storagefrom CloudBerry Lab Inc.
• Cloud Storage Studio from Cerebrata Software
• Azure Storage Explorer from Neudesic
• and the OpenSource SpaceBlock

All of those tools provide graphical user interface for managing data stored in Windows Azure Storage.

 

CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob Storage

CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob Storage is a pretty neat tool that gives you the possibility to copy files from your local machine to the cloud and vice versa using familiar explorer interface. It also offers tabs, allowing you to open different local folders and remote storage accounts.

Another nice feature is Synch Folders – you can set up synchronization between a local folder and container in your storage account, and keep those in synch for as long as CloudBerry is running (you can minimize CloudBerry window to keep it resident in memory - it will clear your taskbar area, and show only the system tray icon).

Initial Experience

One annoyance that I noticed was the first run experience with the registration prompt. The process was quite confusing. First, I still don’t understand why I had to provide username but never use it after that.

And second, I find it hard to copy the long cryptic registration key from my web based email and paste it in the registration box.

Also for some reason F1 help never came up for me. I know I am old fashioned but I spent some time working on Windows Help, and apparently lot of people still use help. If you have the option you better make it work.

My sincere suggestion to the developers from CloudBerry Lab is to rethink the registration workflow but once you get past that CloudBerry is pleasure to use.

Limitations

CloudBerry Explorer for Windows Azure Storage can be used with Windows Azure Storage only. You cannot access storage services from other providers using the tool.

Additionally you cannot browse table and queue information with this tool.

 

Cloud Storage Studio

Cloud Storage Studio certainly provides much more functionality than CloudBerry Explorer – you can browse blobs, queues and tables. Surprisingly for me you can also manage hosted services with it (hence the name doesn’t match completely:)).

Cloud Storage Studio provides rich functionality to manage your Windows Azure Storage and Hosting Services directly from your desktop.

Initial Experience

Although I was pleasantly surprised by the richness of functionality in Cloud Storage Studio, my initial experience wasn’t great. Every task that you perform requires new pop-up window that either has several tabs or bunch of buttons. The upload window didn’t fit on my laptop’s screen with resolution 1024x768, and there was no way to resize it or move it. In order to upload a file I had to guess what the labels on the buttons are (see screenshot below).

My personal opinion is that the UI is not usable on a machine with such or lower resolution.

Additional to that the UI is cluttered with toolbars and icons that show up in different places, and add to the confusion.

Limitations

Cloud Storage Studio is another tool you can use with Windows Azure only. If you can get over the lack of intuitiveness in the UI you can completely manage your Windows Azure accounts (Storage and Hosting) with it.

 

Azure Storage Explorer

Unfortunately I cannot say any good words for Azure Storage Explorer. Starting with the following error prompting me to start Azure Storage Explorer with admin privileges,

and going through the part that right-click doesn’t provide the option Run as Administrator (see below) made me thinking that Azure Storage Explorer wasn’t developed with Vista/Windows 7 security model in mind.

I was finally able to start it but even then the experience wasn’t great. After configuring my storage account I couldn’t get it working – every time I was getting the following error:

With all this I gave up but you may want to give it a try. As it came out later though (while trying the other tools) the creation of the blobs succeeded.

 

SpaceBlock

I have already used SpaceBlock for a while – mostly for viewing my storage account and transferring sample files. It has familiar Explorer interface with window divided in two for the two storage locations opened.

SpaceBlock provides complete functionality to manage containers and blobs in Windows Azure Storage Account.

Added benefit is that you can manage not only Windows Azure Storage but also Amazon S3, Nirvanix, SQL Server Data Services and Sun Cloud Storage accounts. You can also easily transfer data from one cloud account (S3 for example) to another (Windows Azure). Of course the data is downloaded to your local machine from the first account and then uploaded to the second one, and you are limited by your downstream and upstream connection speed.

Initial Experience

The tool is quite simple and learning the functionality is not hard at all. The UI can be improved a little but at least follows common patterns and is easy to navigate through. The icons are familiar, and rarely confused me.

One annoyance is that every time you do a transfer the focus switches to the Transfers tab – I would expect to have the right side pane updated with the name of the transferred file (for some reason unknown to me, none of the tools handled this well).

Limitations

SpaceBlock took another approach – they decided to provide basic storage management functionality for more than one cloud service. Thus SpaceBlock is limited to managing containers and blobs only in Windows Azure Storage.

 

Conclusion

Except Azure Storage Explorer, which I wasn’t able to test at all, all others can be of use for you – either for easy blob management (CloudBerry), tables and queues (Cloud Storage Studio) or migrate data from one cloud provider to another (SpaceBlock).

Give the tools a try and let me know what you think.