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Any time a small company hooks up with a much larger one to serve as an usher into a market, well, that’s never a bad thing. It also doesn’t hurt when the smaller company fills an important gap that the larger one had in its product or service lineup.
This dream of sorts came true for 5-year-old Elastifile, a new-gen provider of enterprise-grade, scalable file storage for the public cloud, when it announced on Dec. 11 the introduction of a fully managed, scalable file storage service for Google Cloud Platform.
Using its tight integration with Google Cloud infrastructure, Elastifile Cloud File Service’s job is to make it easy to deploy, manage and scale enterprise file storage in the public cloud. This is always a nontrivial process—ask any storage administrator.
Elastifile’s secret storage networking sauce helps midsize and large enterprises scale up through the cloud to hundreds and thousands of nodes and provide millions of I/O operations per second (IOPS) in data movement, CEO Erwan Menard told eWEEK. The software runs on any server and can use any type of flash media, including 3D and TLC, he said.
Flash Performance for Any and All Apps
Elastifile claims to bring flash performance to all enterprise applications while reducing the Capex and Opex of virtualized data centers, Menard said. It simplifies the adoption of hybrid cloud by extending file systems across on-premises and cloud deployments, he said.
It also outperforms AWS, Menard said—both in speed of data transfer and in pricing.
“This type of development takes a good group of developers about four years to do,” Menard said. “It’s nontrivial; Google decided it wasn’t something it wanted to do on its own—not when they knew we were doing it.”
Elastifile Cloud File Service, which comes complete with a full suite of enterprise NAS (network-attached storage) features, allows users to select a pay-as-you-go subscription service class that aligns with their storage budget and performance requirements, with pricing for provisioned capacity as low as $0.10/GB/month. The company offers creative pricing when extras such as snapshots are included.
Service classes later can be upgraded or downgraded on-demand, enabling customers to start small and expand performance or capacity later, as dictated by the demands of their evolving workflows, Menard said.
Cost Is Merely a Line Item in Google Bill
The cost of the service shows up as a line item in Google Cloud’s pre-existing billing, so users don’t need to change their existing payment process.
By delivering file storage via standard protocols (such as NFS), with no need for operating system kernel modifications or client-side software installs, Elastifile provides native compatibility with existing applications and workflows, eliminating the need for costly refactoring projects, Menard said.
Elastifile’s new service is also well-suited for horizontal use cases such as persistent storage for Kubernetes, data resilience for pre-emptible cloud virtual machines, HPC file storage and scalable NAS for cloud-native services (such as SAP on Google Cloud), he said.
Potential customers can sign up for early access to the new service here; the early access period continues for three months until March 2019.
For more information, go here.