Cross-Cloud Data Fabric From Start-Up Elastifile

Elastifile, Inc. launched its software-only, scale-out, elastic and flash-native solution that 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 true global namespace to consolidate and migrate any workloads, whether on-premises or in the public cloud.

As the first distributed file system built for the cloud and for flash, the company 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. The firm enables true hybrid IT and dynamic cloud workflows across all sites, eliminating the traditional storage barriers and hardware vendor lock-in. And, with a pay-as-you-grow subscription model for both on-premises and in-cloud primary storage, the company offers easy consumption-based pricing.

“The Elastifile Cloud File System provides a new primary storage and data management option, while also providing cloud-like elastic efficiency through its OpEx pricing model based on consumption,” said Henry Baltazar, research director, 451 Research. “A distributed file system with advanced features such as QoS allows for the kind of scalability and elasticity that become so imperative to enterprises that are moving to and maintaining hybrid cloud deployments. Automatic migration between on-prem and public clouds helps enable the level of agility that clients are demanding, and which is not found in traditional software defined storage environments.”

“Enterprises have struggled to safely migrate to the cloud their most demanding applications, with all their performance, availability, and data services requirements,” said Amir Aharoni, CEO and co-founder, Elastifile. “With Elastifile, they can do so immediately, without refactoring, and with scale-out consistent performance and mobility to innovate true hybrid cloud workflows.”

The solution was designed to provide the application readiness of file with the scale of cloud and the performance of flash, and to extend those capabilities efficiently and transparently to object/cloud tiers as well. The architecture is based on a patented, distributed metadata model and its Bizur consensus algorithm. Combined with innovative adaptive network and data placement, it provides consistent 1-2ms latency at any scale in noisy and heterogeneous cloud environments. All this allows any workload to meet any enterprise SLA in the cloud or data center. Advanced data reduction (global deduplication, compression, and snapshot shipping) and CloudConnect object tiering give all this a TCO that is 50-90% lower than its alternatives, including traditional arrays, hyperconverged infrastructure appliances, and cloud services like Amazon Elastic File System.

Elastifiles enterprise and service provider customers are transforming their businesses with new abilities to lift and shift data and applications to the cloud, move production workloads into stateful containers, deliver integrated analytics, and, of course, support high-performance NAS use cases.

“Elastifile is helping us solve two of our biggest agility challenges for our analytics and cloud services: data mobility and performance,” said Paul Camacho, SVP, cloud products and services, Innova Solutions, Inc. “Its elastic scale-out performance and CloudConnect object and cloud tiering is enabling our transition to containerized micro services and a multi-cloud analytics delivery model. At the same time, Elastifile helps us finally align our infrastructure costs to our true demand and avoid vendor lock-in at both the cloud provider and hardware levels.“

“WWT evaluated Elastifile, and we came away very impressed,” said James Weiser, lead, SDS practice, World Wide Technology, Inc. “As a new distributed file system, it proved out to be a high-performance architecture with built-in resiliency, all while being able to scale to extremely large deployments. Our customers are looking for new, cost-effective ways to use software-defined storage solutions, both to solve traditional datacenter challenges and enable new hybrid cloud breakthroughs. We see a great opportunity to partner with Elastifile to provide a unique solution that is unmatched in the industry.“

“We set out to reinvent data management for the enterprise cloud era,” said Aharoni. “Our architecture provides the agility, scalability and consistent QoS that organizations need for today’s hybrid IT and dynamic cloud workflows like Lift & Shift, integrated analytics, production container workloads, and HPC. And we are purposefully obliterating the traditional storage appliance/perpetual license pricing model, offering the first true subscription/consumption pricing approach with elastic bring-your-own-hardware. Free your data, free your business!”

To demonstrate its capabilities both on-premises and in-cloud, the company has benchmarked several proof points. For a commodity, on-premises hardware cluster deployment with a total cost under $100K, Elastifile demonstrated both throughput over 10GB/s and high transactional performance over 630,000 IO/s, enabling cost-effective consolidation and acceleration of the most demanding enterprise workloads. In addition, 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 consistently between 1-2ms.

Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, proclaimed: “Finally we’re beginning to see what happens when we combine the accessibility of cloud with the file requirements of real businesses. No more restrictions, no more throwing endless hardware all over the globe, and no more data management nightmares. Hats off to Elastifile.“