Elastifile recently announced a partnership with Google to deliver a fully-managed file service delivered via the Google Cloud Platform. I had the opportunity to speak with Jerome McFarland and Dr Allon Cohen about the announcement and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

What Is It?

Elastifile Cloud File Service delivers a self-service SaaS experience, providing the ability to consume scalable file storage that’s deeply integrated with Google infrastructure. You could think of it as similar to Amazon’s EFS.

[image courtesy of Elastifile]

Benefits

Easy to Use

Why would you want to use this service? It:

• Eliminates manual infrastructure management;
• Provisions turnkey file storage capacity in minutes; and
• Can be delivered in any zone, and any region.

Elastic

It’s also cloudy in a lot of the right ways you want things to be cloudy, including:

• Pay-as-you-go, consumption-based pricing;
• Flexible pricing tiers to match workflow requirements; and
• The ability to start small and scale out or in as needed and on-demand.

Google Native

One of the real benefits of this kind of solution though, is the deep integration with Google’s Cloud Platform.

• The UI, deployment, monitoring, and billing are fully integrated;
• You get a single bill from Google; and
• The solution has been co-engineered to be GCP-native.

[image courtesy of Elastifile]

What About Cloud Filestore?

With Google’s recently announced Cloud Filestore, you get:

• A single storage tier selection, being Standard or SSD;
• It’s available in-cloud only; and
• Grow capacity or performance up to a tier capacity.

With Elastifile’s Cloud File Service, you get access to the following features:

• Aggregates performance & capacity of many VMs
• Elastically scale-out or -in; on-demand
• Multiple service tiers for cost flexibility
• Hybrid cloud, multi-zone / region and cross-cloud support

You can also use ClearTier to perform tiering between file and object without any application modification.

Thoughts

I’ve been a fan of Elastifile for a little while now, and I thought their 3.0 release had a fair bit going for it. As you can see from the list of features above, Elastifile are really quite good at leveraging all of the cool things about cloud – it’s software only (someone else’s infrastructure), reasonably priced, flexible, and scalable. It’s a nice change from some vendors who have focussed on being in the cloud without necessarily delivering the flexibility that cloud solutions have promised for so long. Coupled with a robust managed service and some preferential treatment from Google and you’ve got a compelling solution.

Not everyone will want or need a managed service to go with their file storage requirements, but if you’re an existing GCP and / or Elastifile customer, this will make some sense from a technical assurance perspective. The ability to take advantage of features such as ClearTier, combined with the simplicity of keeping it all under the Google umbrella, has a lot of appeal. Elastifile are in the box seat now as far as these kinds of offerings are concerned, and I’m keen to see how the market responds to the solution. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, the Early Access Program opens December 11th with general availability in Q1 2019. In the meantime, if you’d like to try out ECFS on GCP – you can sign up here.