Start-Up Profile: Elastifile

HQs
Herzliya, Israel (R&D), Santa Clara, CA (product management, marketing and sales)

Date founded
2013

Financial funding
$58 million including:
– $8 million in series A in 2014
– $50 million in series B in 2016
Investors include: Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Cisco, Western Digital

Main executives:

Amir Aharoni, CEO and co-founder, was previously president and CEO at Mobixell Networks, a provider of mobile multimedia and IP data and traffic management (acquired by Flash Networks) after being president and COO at Optibase, responsible for scaling the company’s operations and leading it to NASDAQ IPO. Before that, he was VP of engineering and COO of VDOnet, an Internet video-streaming and video-conferencing company acquired by Citrix. He began his career as a VLSI engineer at Intel.

Shahar Frank, CTO and co-founder, was co-founder of XtremIO, where he served as chief scientist until the company’s acquisition by EMC. Prior to this, he led the development of the storage stack for server and desktop virtualization at Red Hat, as well as the architecture development Qumranet‘s VDI solution (acquired by Red Hat). He was also chief architect at Exanet (acquired by Dell) and worked on IB stacks at Voltaire.

Roni Luxenburg, VP of R&D and co-founder, previously was VP of R&D and director of SW engineering at Qumranet, building and delivering its enterprise virtualization platform, and at Pentacom (acquired by Cisco), designing network services for high end routing platforms.

Sebastiano Tevarotto, president and GM, served 25 years at HP, including as VP and GM of communication media business unit, WW marketing manager of enterprise computing, and South-Europe GM. He was formerly chairman and CEO of Wanova, which was acquired by VMware. At VMware, he then held the role of VP of end-user computing strategy and product marketing.

Number of employees
~100

Technology
Software-defined data infrastructure for on-premises, in-cloud, and hybrid cloud deployments

Product
As a cloud-scale distributed file system, on-premises and in-cloud, Elastifile’s data fabric is accessible from anywhere in the world, allowing users to integrate and collaborate with the data as if it’s stored locally. With flash-native, scale-out performance, every workload’s data is available to use without needing to ask for it, wait for it, or copy it across the network. The company does that with performance, enterprise file data services, and software-only flexibility. Its software, scale-out, elastic and flash-native solution delivers hyperscale efficiency to enterprises and cloud service providers. The company frees data from its traditional hardware and site silos to enable hybrid IT, with scale and consistent, all-flash performance across a global namespace to consolidate and migrate any workloads, whether on-premises or in the public cloud. As the distributed file system built for the cloud and for flash, it offers robust enterprise data services with linear scale-out performance, consistent latency, and granular check-in/check-out object tiering for data migration and backup.

With hardware cluster deployment with a cost under $100,000, Elastifile demonstrated both throughput over 10GB/s and transactional performance over 630,000IO/s, enabling cost-effective consolidation and acceleration of demanding enterprise workloads.

A recent deployment on the Google Cloud Platform demonstrated Elastifiles ability to linearly scale performance to support 10,000 simultaneous client connections, generated by 1,000 containerized applications. For all these workloads, at all scalability points, latency remains between 1-2ms.

Price range
List price starts at $0.02/GB/month for subscription pricing.

Partners

Technology partners: Google, VMware, Docker, Dell, Cisco, Lenovo, Supermicro, Western Digital, Samsung, Micron
Cloud service providers and VARs: Improved IT, Innova Soltuions, lono, StrataZone, Agosto, NexStor, SigmaVista, RRC, CloudSchak, Komposite, Vesper, Linfosys, Redline, BIGTECh, Nephos, World Wide Tchnologies, Inc., EVOTEK, Fabrics4Clouds

Distributors and OEMs
Google Cloud, docker, Dell, Cisco, Lenovo, SuperMicro, Western Digital, Samsung, Micron

Number of customers
Several dozen as of April 2017 including ewww IT and Tel, eww ag, Corner4, Linfosys, sigmavista.it consulting, Damecon, Rideau

Applications
Hybrid cloud data management, in-cloud distributed file services, high-performance file services, stateful containers

Target markets
In-cloud file services (cloud service providers)