- Google Cloud announced it is acquiring cloud-native enterprise file storage company Elastifile
Google has announced it is acquiring cloud-native enterprise file storage company Elastifile for an undisclosed amount. Elastifile — which was founded by chairman Amir Aharoni, VP of R&D Roni Luxenburg, and CTO Shahar Frank — raised about $74 million in funding prior to the acquisition (Crunchbase). However, VentureBeat pointed out that an anonymous source at CTech pegged the deal at around $200 million.
Elastifile is already fully native on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and it helps enterprises migrate to the cloud through its file storage services that run at scale. And Elastifile enables enterprises to elastically scale-out or scale-in storage capacity with an on-demand basis. Plus Elastifile runs a service called ClearTier that provides intelligent tiering between file and object storage.
GCP already has its own file storage system called Cloud Filestore. However, the Elastifile Cloud File Service is more flexible and cost-effective for certain enterprises. As part of the deal, Google is going to integrate Elastifile with Cloud Filestore.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has been aggressively making deals like this to advance Google’s cloud computing services. Some of the other acquisitions that Kurian oversaw include Chronicle (cybersecurity company formed at Alphabet’s moonshot X division) and Looker ($2.6 billion deal). This is especially important since Google Cloud is one of the fastest-growing divisions at Google, which is closing the gap against its largest rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
“File storage is fundamental to enterprise infrastructure and a priority for customers looking to accelerate their digital transformation. For example, companies who run SAP need access to highly available and consistent file storage. Developers building applications that use Kubernetes need file storage for their stateful workloads. As these critical applications migrate to the cloud, IT teams need simple, natively compatible storage options along with the features and performance to support them,” said Kurian in a blog post. “Elastifile is a pioneer in solving the challenges associated with file storage for enterprise-grade applications running at scale in the cloud. They’ve built a unique software-defined approach to managed Network Attached Storage (NAS), enabling organizations to scale performance or capacity without cumbersome overhead. Building on this technology, our teams are excited to join together and integrate Elastifile with Google Cloud Filestore.”
Naidu Annamaneni — the CIO and VP of Global IT at eSilicon — pointed out that the integrated circuit (IC) design process can produce a wide spectrum of compute and storage requirements. And this translates into “thousands of cores and petabytes of storage for some portions of the IC design.” And Annamaneni pointed out that the combination of Elastifile and Google Cloud will provide the scale and performance that is needed to successfully deliver ICs on time and on budget.
“In recent years, we’ve seen enterprises increasingly deploy traditional applications as well as new performance-sensitive applications to the cloud,” noted Deepak Mohan — Research Director at IDC. “These applications require on-premises level of performance for latency and consistency alongside of the scalability benefits of the cloud. The acquisition of Elastifile will better enable Google Cloud customers to meet this mix of needs, as they deploy such workloads to the Google Cloud Platform.”
Google actually launched Elastifile File Service on GCP earlier this year. And customers such as Appsbroker, eSilicon, and Forbes are taking advantage of Elastifile solutions on GCP.
“Helping our customers solve difficult storage challenges for their most critical workloads has enabled these enterprises to unleash the full benefits of the cloud,” explained Menard. “We’re excited to join Google for the next part of our journey, building on the success we’ve had together over the past two and a half years. File storage is essential to enterprise cloud adoption and, together with Google, we are well-positioned to serve those needs.”
