ownCloud and Western Digital Advance Plans for Self-Hosted Device
ownCloud, an open platform that anyone can leverage to create their own cloud platform, has been getting a lot of attention for its flexibility, and because interest in private clouds is on the rise. You can move beyond what services such as Dropbox and Box offer by leveraging ownCloud, and you don't have to have your files sitting on servers that you don't choose, governed by people you don't know. We've provided several guides for getting going with it.
Now, Western Digital and the folks at ownCloud are teaming up to create a self-hosted device with Western Digital hardware and ownCloud software, to be made available for online purchase in early 2016. It's a smart move for ownCloud, and could lead to turnkey, secure cloud solutions based on it.
According to a blog post on the collaboration:
"At ownCloud, we are always looking for ways to lower the barrier to entry, get our technology into more hands, and give more people a safe home for their data. Of course, there are ownCloud providers which already serve well over a million users across 6 continents, but the ability to easily run ownCloud at home is important to many of our users. We’ve been working on this problem on the software side but still, you had to provide a computer as server for it all to work."
"The Western Digital Labs team contacted us looking to work together with the ownCloud community on offering a self hosted device running ownCloud pre-installed out of the box. Our end goal is to provide a solution for non-technical end users, something which requires few skills to set up."
Meanwhile, if you just want to get going with ownCloud, here are some great resources:
The FLOSS Manuals ownCloud Guide. As we've reported, FLOSS Manuals' guide to ownCloud is completely free, and a good starting point. Before diving into it, you may want to gain some familiarity with what ownCloud is, which we covered here. The FLOSS Manuals guide is aimed to be a complement to the existing documentation at http://doc.owncloud.org. It has sections on how to share files, calendars, contacts and more in the cloud, and optimize security. There is a whole section on SysAdmin tools, which makes experimenting with ownCloud easy.
Leverage the Pi. In this post, you can get easy instructions for running ownCloud with a Raspberry Pi device. Very cool.
ownCloud on Linux. There are many good tutorials available for running ownCloud on Linux. Linux User & Developer has a good one here, and Ubuntu users can find an easy tutorial here.
Video Tutorials. For some people, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the good news is that there are lots of video tutorials that help you set ownCloud up in minutes. You can find lots of them on YouTube, including specialized ones that can get you going with applications in the cloud.
Twitter Resources. You can keep up with social postings surrounding ownCloud on Twitter, either through the official channel https://twitter.com/ownCloud or the community channel: https://twitter.com/ownClouders.
Forums. Finally, ownCloud has lots of useful forums that you can dive into for more resources. There are many specialized tutorials on the forums. Starting here is a good first step.
Go Mobile. Don't forget that there are mobile clients for ownCloud, which can help you get much more out of the platform. With these clients, you can remotely access an ownCloud server, browse your files, download assets and more.
The nice thing about having your ownCloud deployment in place is that you can access files and applications from anywhere. You also control the security of your setup, and you don't have to worry about security breaches. Hopefully, you'll find some good resources for getting started here.