Elastifile Assigned Patent

Elastifile, Inc. announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has awarded it a patent for tiered storage in flash memory based on dynamic write activity and related metadata management.

This technology allows company’s software-defined storage to deliver consistent flash performance across different endurance tiers. This means consolidated scale-out workloads can confidently leverage cost-effective configurations of different flash devices.

U.S. Patent No. 9,524,109 covers a method that includes receiving data objects for storage in at least one or more first storage devices characterized by a first write endurance, and one or more second storage devices characterized by a second write endurance that is lower than the first write endurance. Respective write-activity levels are estimated for the data objects. For each data object, a choice is made whether to store the data object in the first storage device or in the second storage device based on an estimated write-activity level of the data object. The data object is stored in the chosen storage devices.

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“Our flash tiering enables dynamic workload storage across different devices based on both endurance and performance factors, not just access latency as is done in other typical tiering solutions,” said Shahar Frank, CTO and co-founder, Elastifile. “This allows for heterogeneous environents to support different mix of flash devices. By placing data dynamically based on write activity, we are providing the most efficient and cost-effective way to deliver all-flash performance with enterprise services in bring-your-own-hardware (software-defined) infrastructures.“

This latest awarded patent provides further validation to the architectural approach driving firm’s scale-out, flash-native, software-only solution, which creates a single global namespace across all sites and all workloads. Company’s distributed storage platform combines full-featured enterprise file and object capabilities with linearly scalable performance, interface flexibility, precision analytics, and management and quality-of-service controls. The architecture provides the scalability and elasticity required to support on-premises, public cloud, and hybrid-cloud environments.

“Intellectual property is the lifeblood of any organization and these patents that Elastifile has been awarded serve as proof of our innovation while differentiating us from other solutions and approaches,” said Amir Aharoni, CEO and co-founder, Elastifile. “We have worked hard to give our customers total control and choice in their Flash and server options, combining the availability and data services of enterprise storage with the elastic agility, multi-tenancy and cost-efficiency of the public cloud for their on-prem and cloud workloads.“