Lancompanion is our emerging storage cloud architecture, based on miniature NAS adapters that convert desktop USB disk drives into a low-cost enterprise storage solution. Bundled with enhanced security, management and control features, Lancompanion NAS adapters can seamlessly integrate with corporate IT infrastructure. Lancompanion solution is not bound to a particular hardware platform. Businesses can implement it on a wide range of Linux-supporting devices, ranging from tiny SoC, ARM architecture boards, up to fully-fledged servers. This makes Lancompanion NAS adapters scalable in their capabilities to achieve the targeted performance. As for a start, we have built Lancompanion NAS adapters on top of the popular Raspberry Pi. This gave Lancompanion NAS adapter a tiny footprint that allows it to latch to disk drive chassis securely, forming a single network storage unit. Lancompanion NAS adapter represents the building block of an ever-expanding storage solution. It bridges the gap between cheap standalone end-user disk drives and expensive enterprise storage cabinets. Having no single point of failure in corporate ICT infrastructure can be prohibitively expensive and sometimes impractical to achieve. Down time for corporate processing power, storage, or network can leave centrally kept data inaccessible to users. On the other hand, keeping user data locally stored on user workstations would require stringent and cumbersome backup procedure to account for storage media failures and data misuse. Therefore, both centralized and distributed ICT design approaches prove to have some serious drawbacks alongside their well-known advantages. Lancompanion storage cloud represents an entry-level corporate cloud. It can locally serve work groups within the enterprise, and at the same time create gateways to corporate global cloud for information sharing and interoperability. Lancompanion NAS adapter implements high-end NAS approaches for maintaining corporate data rather than focusing on just backing up user computers. It supports clustering two Lancompanion storage units, each having its own attached disk. The duo operates in active/passive mode so that whenever the active unit malfunctions, the passive takes over serving users. Clustering in effect creates RAID-1 disks for the duo. Lancompanion NAS adapter is capable of mirroring partitions on disks of two Lancompanion storage units throughout the network. In case one storage unit disk malfunctions, its mirror disk engages in disk recovery. Snapshot feature, on the other hand, allows backing-up disk partitions periodically on reserved space on the same disk. Traditional back-up utilities can then operate on snapshots rather than on user disk partitions, thus keeping user data accessible online most of the time. Lancompanion NAS adapter supports on-the-fly encryption/decryption of user data in the cloud, using the popular open-source TrueCrypt. Combined with secure communication, data is securely portable and accessible between the cloud‘s Lancompanion storage units and user computers. Businesses can salvage encrypted disks off failed disk drive controllers, and can reuse them without any loss of data. Desktop NAS devices that employ proprietary vendor-specific hardware-based encryption lack these features. Data would be insecurely traversing the cloud and would be vulnerable to loss unless businesses back up those NAS devices constantly. Lancompanion NAS adapter integrates with corporate Active Directory, thus benefiting from corporate security and management infrastructure. Businesses can configure Lancompanion storage units, from anywhere in their corporate clouds, using our specially designed portals. We provide three levels of management: user, device, and cloud. The user portal enables users to manage encryption and sharing of their files on the designated storage units. The device portal enables the administrators to configure each storage unit separately: specifying authorized users, their quotas, snapshots, and other device-specific settings. The cloud portal enables the administrators to inventory their corporate cloud and to identify Lancompanion storage units. It facilitates the handling of mirroring and clustering between Lancompanion storage units. FEATURES: converts desktop disk drives into enterprise NAS provides extendable entry-level storage cloud for all enterprise sizes innovative distributed storage architecture for building storage clouds applies high-end storage features to SOHO storage drives for a fraction of the price implements disk clustering, partition mirroring, partition snapshots, and on-the-fly encryption integrates with Active Directory produced NAS is manageable from anywhere in corporate LAN/WAN supports three management portals for configuring produced NAS: user, admin, and cloud [...] (+)