Last week, Haylix was recognised by BRW magazine as one of Australia’s fastest growing startups. Each company which made the list needed to satisfy the following requirements:

•  Start trading after June 30, 2007
• Had two or more fiscal years of revenue
• Had revenue of over $500,000 in 2010-11
• Australian-owned
• Have more than one main customer
• Independently audited revenue figures (for private companies)

Haylix came in at 87th on the list and we are absolutely delighted with that result. We are also humbled to be the only Australian cloud infrastructure provider to have been listed in the top 100.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the many, many people who have been a part of our success to date. This includes our wonderful suppliers, talented team, and of course our great clients.

As we look back on the past two years, there’s much for everyone to be proud of. My personal favourite was our expansion into Hong Kong (I’m a sucker for BBQ Pork Buns). But of course, a business never grows by looking at the past and so now we look to the future. Haylix Cloud Storage is already proving to be a big hit and there’s even more exciting new cloud infrastructure products just around the corner.

Here’s looking forward to next year!

-Michael Richardson

The skilled developers who make CloudBerry Explorer, a powerful file manager for cloud storage environments, recently published an update to formally incorporate Haylix Cloud Storage in their OpenStack edition. This post will give you a bit more information on how CloudBerry Explorer works and how to get started with it in just a few minutes.

Getting CloudBerry Explorer

CloudBerry Explorer for OpenStack runs on Windows and is available in both free and paid editions. The free edition alone comes with lots of stuff that should satisfy most uses, including:

• Upload and download from local storage to Haylix Cloud Storage
• Create, list, delete, and publish containers
• Manipulate container headers
• Make containers public or private (to enable/disable public delivery with Akamai)

The paid edition (“PRO”) costs about $40 and takes things to another level. PRO makes things far more powerful, especially for developers working with very large data sets:

• Compression
• Client-side Encryption
• Multipart and multi-threaded uploads
• Synchronise files between local storage and Haylix Cloud Storage
• Compare local and remote storage repositories

The pro edition ads a lot of really cool features and in our own opinion is well worth the extra couple of bucks. You can buy it here.

In the tutorial below, we’ll be working with the free edition and showing off just the basic features. You can download the free edition here.

Step 1 – Get your Haylix Cloud Storage API key

Ok, we’re misleading you a little bit. Step 1 is obviously to get a copy of CloudBerry Explorer, but that’s too easy to warrant it’s own section, right? So, assuming you have that, you’ll need your API key in order move any further.

The API key is emailed to you when you first sign up your account, but can also be retrieved easily via Haylix Command. Simply log in at www.haylix.com and go to the “Account Management” screen and copy  you’ll find your API username.

What’s important here is the Account Name, Admin Username, and Admin Key. You’ll need all three for the CBE connection parameters.

Step 2: Install and Connect Using CloudBerry Explorer

Installing CBE is pretty easy so there’ll be no screenshots for that. Once installed and open, you’ll notice a two-panel display, very similar to the following:

This display shows you a local and remote file source. In the example above, our local hard drive is both the local and remote but once we add an account, you’ll have a bit more power. So lets’d do that!

Step 2 – Add your Haylix Cloud Storage Account

First, click on “File > Haylix Account”:

Next, click on “New Account”

And finally, enter your API Account Name, Username and Key into the appropriate fields.

You can click on the “Test Connection” link to, well you guessed it, test your connection.

Step 3: Create a Container and Uploading Files

Now it’s the fun part! Once you click “OK” and “Close” you’ll be returned to the two-panel file explorer. On the right-panel, you can now change the view to the remote cloud storage account, as per the example below:

Once you’ve made this selection, the file window on the right will either show no content, or, will show any content you’ve already uploaded using another application. If you have no content, you’ll need to create a container to store all of your files. This is the little cube icon you see on in the top of the container. Click on that and specify your container name, and you’ll then be able to see your container in the list of remote files.

In this example, we’ll create a container called “DVDs” and a sub-directory called “Software ISOs”.  If you enter into the “Software ISOs” director on the right-hand pane, you can simply drag-and-drop the files or folders you’d like to upgrade from the left to right panes. You’ll be able to track the progress of your uploads or downloads using the queue inside CloudBerry.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the features and functionality available in Cloudberry, both for the free and paid editions. We would highly recommend checking out the sync functionality in the PRO edition, which has an absolutely fantastic “sync” functionality between local and remote storage areas.

Haylix Cloud Storage already includes a 3-month free trial, which provides 50GB of storage and 10GB of outbound traffic every month for the first three months.

In addition to this free trial, today, we’re really excited to announce that all Haylix Cloud Storage accounts will get their first 1GB of storage and 1GB of outbound traffic free, every month, for the life of the account. I know I tend to get pretty sceptical when a company offers me free stuff, so allow me to be really clear:

• If you store less than 1GB in Haylix Cloud Storage, you won’t be charged for storage at all.
• If you store more than 1GB, the first GB will still be free.
• If you download less than 1GB, you won’t be charged for downloads at all.
• If you download more than 1GB, the first GB will still be free.

Why are we doing this? Of course, the main reason is that we’re just really nice people. But we’re also noticing that our cloud storage customers are either using less than 1GB, or, much more than 1GB.

For those customers who use less than the first GB of storage or traffic/downloads, the 99c bill you’d get (12c for storage, and 87c for bandwidth) costs us about as much to generate as we make from it.

Click here if you’d like to know more about Haylix Cloud Storage and to sign up for a free trial.