Tag Archives: GCP

Elastifile Announces Cloud File Service

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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.

Random Short Take #9

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Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I found interesting. You might find it interesting too. Maybe.

 

 

Scale Computing Announces Cloud Unity – Clouds For Everyone

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The Announcement

Scale Computing recently announced the availability of a new offering: Cloud Unity. I had the opportunity to speak with the Scale Computing team at VMworld US this year to run through some of the finer points of the announcement and thought I’d cover it off here.

 

Cloud What?

So what exactly is Cloud Unity? If you’ve been keeping an eye on the IT market in the last few years, you’ll notice that everything has cloud of some type in its product name. In this case, Cloud Unity is a mechanism by which you can run Scale Computing’s HC3 hypervisor nested in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The point of the solution, ostensibly, is to provide a business with disaster recovery capability on a public cloud platform. You’re basically running an HC3 cluster on GCP, with the added benefit that you can create an encrypted VXLAN connection between your on-premises HC3 cluster and the GCP cluster. The neat thing here is that everything runs as a small instance to handle replication from on-premises and only scales up when you’re actually needing to run the VMs in anger. The service is bought through Scale Computing, and starts from as little as $1000US per month (for 5TB). There are other options available as well and the solution is expected to be Generally Available in Q4 this year.

 

Conclusion and Further Reading

This isn’t the first time nested virtualisation has been released as a product, with AWS, Azure and Ravello all doing similar things. The cool thing here is that it’s aimed at Scale Computing’s traditional customers, namely small to medium businesses. These are the people who’ve bought into the simplicity of the Scale Computing model and don’t necessarily have time to re-write their line of business applications to work as cloud native applications (as much as it would be nice that this were the case). Whilst application lift and shift isn’t the ideal outcome, the other benefit of this approach is that companies who may not have previously invested in DR capability can now leverage this product to solve the technical part of the puzzle fairly simply.

DR should be a simple thing to have in place. Everyone has horror stories of data centres going off line because of natural disasters or, more commonly, human error. The price of good DR, however, has traditionally been quite high. And it’s been pretty hard to achieve. The beauty of this solution is that it provides businesses with solid technical capabilities for a moderate price, and allows them to focus on people and processes, which are arguably the key parts of DR that are commonly overlooked. Disasters are bad, which is why they’re called disasters. If you run a small to medium business and want to protect yourself from bad things happening, this is the kind of solution that should be of interest to you.

A few years ago, Scale Computing sent me a refurbished HC1000 cluster to play with, and I’ve had first-hand exposure to the excellent support staff and experience that Scale Computing tell people about. The stories are true – these people are very good at what they do and this goes a long way in providing consumers with confidence in the solution. This confidence is fairly critical to the success of technical DR solutions – you want to leverage something that’s robust in times of duress. You don’t want to be worrying about whether it will work or not when your on-premises DC is slowly becoming submerged in water because building maintenance made a boo boo. You want to be able to focus on your processes to ensure that applications and data are available when and where they’re required to keep doing what you do.

If you’d like to read what other people have written, Justin Warren posted a handy article at Forbes, and Chris Evans provided a typically insightful overview of the announcement and the challenges it’s trying to solve that you can read here. Scott D. Lowe also provided a very useful write-up here. Scale Computing recently presented at Tech Field Day 15, and you can watch their videos here.