Due to a hardware failure in our cluster system, we recently discovered some possibilities for improvements in our infrastructure as well as our server software. As you may have noticed, most of our infrastructure was available, but some services were not or only usable with limitations.

As failures are common, when it comes to IT, we used the opportunity to gain a benefit from this situation and added improved redundancy to PowerFolder Server internal routines and our infrastructure hardware to avoid longer downtimes in the future.

Now we can serve also our customers with that benefit, since the development of stronger failover routines have also been implemented into our server software, which is running in several enterprise-scale environments. Furthermore we are happy to serve you with our knowledge about automatic failover scenarios, to help you implement them also in your distributed, but at the same time centrally managed PowerFolder cluster environment.

In detail we added:

• Automatic failover mechanisms, which result in improved availability for the registration & licensing service as well as database related transactions
• New hardware for our PowerFolder Server cluster, to stand by in case of malfunction

If you are not yet a customer, but searching for a reliable, centrally managed and distributed data backup or collaboration solution, our sales team will be happy to introduce you to the advantages of a PowerFolder Server cluster.

Some users reported problems when trying to install the latest PowerFolder client.

If you are affected by this problem indicated by a message like “PowerFolder.exe still running” we have a workaround for you.

Please download and install the upcoming PowerFolder version 5.6 optimized edition RC1.

Note: When later upgrading to the official release version (ETA: 2 weeks) your configuration will be preserved. (Release notes for version 5.6, Read more about the optimized edition)

Blessings and a fantastic year 2012 to you all.

Due to a severe hardware failure in one of our clusters a limited number of users may not be able to synchronize their data to the cloud or access the data via the web portal.
The service interruption may persist until the 21st of December 2011.
Data integrity is not affected for any user, synchronization and backup between the clients is not affected.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

In 2012, we will introduce a new technology across the board that will feature a significant improvement in the memory footprint and improved performance.
As a teaser for the holiday season we have decided to release a BETA client with this technology.

The technology introduced in the new client reduces the idle memory footprint from 200 to approximately 50mb while increasing overall performance. In medium to high load situations the new client is expected to use about 150mb with 50k files and a few dozen GB of data.

Beware that this is BETA and will install into a seperate folder, we do appreciate any feedback and suggestions.

Due to unscheduled maintenance the service is not available for two hours until approximately 22:00 CET 19.12.2011.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

New Features include:

- Simplified web interface

- Mobile web app has a powerful search, music player and gallery

- Web portal and mobile app supports multiple languages now: German and English.
- New APIs (beta) for Accounts, Folders and a Login callback API.
- RADIUS authentication (beta) support/connection just like LDAP / Active Directory as authentication source.
- Download of entire top-level folder as zip file is possible now.
- Web-login for regular users can now be blocked.
- An imprint link can now be shown on all web portal pages.

Full Patchnotes and update information can be found in the wiki here!

PowerFolder is now providing its proven software to the GWDG to create a secure In-House-Cloud within the research facilities it-infrastructure. The GWDG is the university computing centre for the Georg August University Göttingen and computing and IT competence centre for the Max Planck Society.

Read full press release

PowerFolder selected as Next-Generation-Cloud-Solution for the School System of Luxembourg.

Read the full press release (only German right now, english due soon!)