Elastifile Introduces ClearTier

Elastifile Ltd., in scalable file storage for the public cloud, announced enhancements to its data management platform.

With the introduction of ClearTier, a feature of the company’s latest product release, the company is empowering customers to reap the performance benefits of software-defined, cloud-native primary storage, while reducing cloud infrastructure costs.

Elastifile’s ‘born in cloud’ elastic storage solution enables frictionless shifting and bursting of enterprise NAS workflows into public cloud environments, with no application refactoring and no reliance on proprietary underlying hardware.

Version 3.0 of the company’s software includes ClearTier functionality, which efficiently integrates the best aspects of file storage and object storage to drive in-cloud NAS costs at $0.03/GB/month.

With ClearTier, file data can be placed in inexpensive object storage while remaining transparently visible for access through the Elastifile Cloud File System, thereby economically expanding the amount of data natively available for processing by applications. Data placement is automated via policy-based controls, with no manual user intervention required. Leveraging this new feature, organizations can enjoy the workflow acceleration benefits of a high-performance scale-out NAS, while also securing the cost savings delivered by object storage.

“As we design and implement cloud-integrated workflows, minimizing TCO is a key criteria for success,” said Naidu Annamaneni, VP of global IT, eSilicon Corporation. “The ability to transparently tier in-cloud data between file and object storage is very valuable as it will allow us to closely align our infrastructure costs to our business needs.”

In addition to helping organizations balance performance requirements and cost constraints, ClearTier also enhances business agility. A newly created Elastifile file system can immediately access pre-existing data on object storage, thus enabling rapid, on-demand deployment of application storage infrastructure in response to dynamic business conditions.

“As they take their workflows to cloud, organizations need standard file system protocols like NFS, but they’re often forced into unenviable tradeoffs between data accessibility and infrastructure costs,” said Scott Sinclair, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “With their latest release, Elastifile is addressing this challenge by merging the performance and application compatibility of their cloud file system with the cost-effective data capacity delivered by object storage.”

ClearTier also expands upon Elastifile’s data management capabilities by placing file system snapshots on the inexpensive object storage tier, thereby eliminating constraints on consumed capacity. This functionality lets customers retain a granular data history, without investing in additional primary storage resources.

“To unlock the benefits of cloud for enterprise NAS workflows, we began by delivering cloud-native scalability and best-in-class file system performance,” said Erwan Menard, CEO, Elastifile. “Now, with this latest release and the introduction of ClearTier, we’re continuing our mission by enabling disruptively low cloud storage TCO.”

Elastifile is available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and bare metal on-premises environments, with Microsoft Azure availability coming soon.