Exclusive Interview From Erwan Menard, CEO of Elastifile

Erwan Menard, 45, became CEO of CEO of Elastifile, Inc. last May 2018 replacing founder Amir Aharoni. Formerly he was president and COO of Scality from March 2015 to January 2018 reporting to CEO Jerome Lecat. From 2011 to 2013 he was COO of DDN. Prior to that, he spent 15 years in the telecom industry, most recently as VP and GM, leading HP‘s communications and media solutions group from 2008 to 2011. Previously he held international business management positions at Alcatel, and Alcatel-Lucent, and managed operations in Asia, North America and Europe. Hobbies: “primarily sailing, and specifically foiling boats. Technology is reinventing our sport, and we can now race thee times faster than the wind. We are a family of sailors, and time on the water together is very precious to me.”

StorageNewsletter.com: Why the name of Elastifile?
Because our enterprise customers can elastically store their files in any cloud, private or public

Born in 2013, Elastifile has raised $74 million in 3 rounds in 3 years. How do you explain the presence of Huawei, Cisco, Lenovo or Dell EMC Ventures in your capital? And at another level Samsung, Western Digital and Micron?
Elastifile founders formed a strong vision for a modern-age and software-defined file system designed for the flash era and spreading across public and private clouds. That certainly caught the attention of many industry leaders.

How do you differentiate in software-defined storage?
We design for the cloud. We augment public cloud capabilities. Many vendors design for the datacenter and eventually or occasionally deploy in-cloud. We design for the cloud (which has a lot of specific implications not only in terms of architecture, but also in terms of user experience and TCO) and make the software also deployable on-premises.

Why not to choose erasure coding but replication and data reduction?
Actually we rely on replication and data reduction. Equally importantly, we design to take advantage of the intrinsic characteristics of storage building blocks in cloud. Our file namespace spans across hot and cold tiers and leverages their characteristics to drive efficiency at the right cost/performance ratio for your workload. For example, in AWS we deploy across Local SSD, EBS and S3. In Google Cloud we deploy across Local SSDs, SSD Persistent Disks (PDs), Standard PDs and GCS.

What’s Bizur?
Bizur is our consistency algorithm, and one of the patented ingredients of our secret sauce.

What’s the new ClearTier?
ClearTier is our v3.0 flagship feature and allows to tier file system data to object storage, driving your costs down to as low as $0.03/GB/month. Your application sees the whole data set and namespace, while our policies in the background locate the less used data on object storage (S3 or GCS for example), keeping the frequently used data and all metadata in a hotter tier (typically build on EBS at AWS or PDs at GCP).

How can you run millions of IO/s with less than 2ms latency?
To support the demands of cloud workflows, our architecture was designed to be both highly parallel and efficiently scalable. As a result, we can effectively handle I/O-intensive workloads with consistent, low latency.

On which public clouds your product is available?
AWS and GCP to date, and soon Azure.

Is your R&D totally in Israel?
Yes, and indeed it’s a great place for storage talent.

What’s the price of a complete solution?
Thanks to ClearTier we can deliver a total cost as low as $0.03/GB/m, including public cloud infrastructure and our software license price.

Your OEMs?
No OEM to date. We are available on GCP Marketplace, AWS Marketplace (within the next few weeks) and Azure Marketplace at a later stage. We support both consumption-based and ‘bring your own license’ business models.

How many customers? In which business?
Dozens of enterprise customers in many different industries such as media and entertainment, financial services, life sciences, EDA, etc. Anyone who has workloads relying on scale-out NAS and needs to take them to cloud is a potential customer.

Your competitors?
We are typically being compared to public clouds own file storage services, such as AWS EFS, Azure Files and Google FileStore. Our differentiators are scale, performance and feature set. We also compete with NetApp cloud offerings. They acknowledge the growing demand for enterprise-grade scale-out file storage in-cloud … which we’re happy to serve with a truly cloud-native approach.

Your roadmap?
With ClearTier and or V3.0, our NFS offering is comprehensive (snapshots, de-dupe, compression, async replication, etc.), and supports already burst, lift&shift, hybrid cloud scenarios. We will continue developing features for Kubernetes and add SMB. We have also a data mover (CloudConnect) which helps customers moving data from any NAS to any object. A lot of innovation is also in the works with regards to customer experience. We want to make in-cloud file storage even easier. More to come on that front in the near future …

How many employees?
About 65 and growing

You were formerly for three years president and COO of Scality? Were you fired? Why? How do you see the future of Scality?
I had a great time at Scality growing the company to a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader two years in a row, sealing strategic partnerships with HPE and Cisco. They just got that leader status for the third time. Amazing team who know how to serve very well large enterprise accounts. I remain a happy shareholder of Scality.

Do you intend to become US citizen?
Together with my wife and three kids we have lived in six different countries and three continents over the years. We are citizens of the world. Home for us is California, and I assume our kids will study in US Universities. We are grateful with the opportunities both life give us, and yes US citizenship makes sense.

Who are others French CEOs in the WW storage industry?
Jerome Lecat, Scality. By the way CEOs are one thing, but most importantly the French engineers are very well suited for infrastructure in general, storage being one of the swimlanes. If you like IT infrastructure you meet French engineers around the globe, starting with Silicon Valley. [There are also French CEOs at firms including Atempo, Cozy.io, Crocus, DDN, Infinit, Kalray, Rozo. Editor]

Do I miss any question?
We could have talked about Kubernetes and the associated persistent storage needs. It’s obvious that NFS remains a very natural and easy way for developers and applications to consume storage. Containers are no exception and we see great demand.