I shared my thoughts on Elastifile after seeing them at Storage Field Day 12. Since then they’ve been busy developing their product and Andy Fenselau kindly to the time to update me on what’s been happening with them in the months since. They’re also my new favourites because they use they understand the difference between premise and premises.

About

Elastifile were founded in 2013 and are based in Santa Clara, CA and Herzliya, Israel. They have Global Sales & Marketing (throughout North America, EMEA, and China). They’re well-funded with nearly $70M, and have a number of strategic investors involved, including Dell Technologies Capital, Cisco, and Western Digital.

The Problem

Elastifile tell me they’re solving the hybrid-cloud enterprise data management problem. Companies are still facing the following issues:

•  On-premises struggles with cloud-like efficiency – they need scalability, “hardware freedom”, and consumption-based pricing; and
•  Unable to lift and shift to true hybrid cloud.

People have been “[g]oing to a gun fight with knives for the last few years”.

The Solution

Cross-cloud Data Fabric

The solution, according to Elastifile, is their Cross-cloud Data Fabric, offering the simplicity of file, the scalability of object, and the performance of block.

[image courtesy of Elastifile]

Primary Use Cases

The primary uses cases for Elastifile are

• Hybrid and multi-cloud file services;
• High-performance compute and analytics; and
• Container data persistence and mobility.

Core Components

• Software-only, cloud-scale distributed file system;
• CloudConnect granular object tiering; and
• Consumption-based, subscription pricing.

Elastifile tell me that a lot of customers have been starting with on-premises deployments. They can also accommodate different tiers of flash and map to different SLAs.

Licensing

From a licensing perspective, Elastifile license the solution by active data capacity (the minimum configuration is three servers). There are three consumption models available:

• On-premises tier;
• On-premises with CloudConnect tier; and
• In-cloud and cross-cloud tiers.

It’s subscription based, with a pay as you grow model via quarterly true-ups.

CloudConnect

• Use CloudConnect to tier inactive data to cloud;
• Can be used as a cloud-based backup solution; and
• Only shipping the deltas (deduped and compressed) before it’s sent up there.

If you need to burst into the cloud, just check out the data you need and you can run the apps in the cloud (at this point data mobility starts to line up with app mobility).

[image courtesy of Elastifile]

Elastifile mentioned an example of cloud bursting for parallel EDA. In that example, for two months of the year they use 100% of the infrastructure. The rest of the time, they’re using 20%.

Other News

In other news, Elastifile recently announced certification and native support as a Google Cloud Tech Partner and Amazon Partner Network (APN) Technology Partner. They’ve also announced the availability of the Elastifile Dell EMC OEM Solutions Appliance. You can read more about that here (in French).

Final Thoughts

Elastifile currently have around forty customers with more on the way. From a product maturity perspective, features such as encryption at rest are coming, which I think will help them penetrate certain segments more easily. There’s a lot to like about the flexibility of the product, and I’m a big fan of simplified subscription models to license products. I’d be interested to see just how well it really performs in a public cloud scenario, but this is a concern for every cloud-friendly storage solution. Hybrid is the new black, and it feels like Elastifile are putting a lot of work into making sure they’ve got a product that plays well in that space. I’m looking forward to seeing whether they can build on what seems like a well thought platform and compete with some of the bigger scale-out players.