A key enabler of digital transformation, the cloud has been disrupting systems and operations, driving experiences, and eliminating the IT limitations that have traditionally defined the boundaries of an organization’s productivity and efficiency. With cloud infrastructure allowing organizations to scale their IT capabilities elastically to align with the demands of their business as well as to meet customer expectations, today’s modern enterprises are tapping the power of the cloud to gain performance advantage and achieve sustainable business growth.
When it comes to ensuring successful cloud adoption, deployment, and expansion, one of the companies that is currently influencing the cloud storage and data management market is Elastifile. As the leading provider of scalable, enterprise-grade cloudfile storage, Elastifile provides the cloud-based data management layer needed to support pre-existing enterprise applications and workflows.
SourceForge had the opportunity to speak with Jerome McFarland, the VP of Marketing at Elastifile, to discuss the importance of cloud storage and data management for today’s modern enterprises. McFarland also talks about the Elastifile Cross-Cloud Data Fabric and how Elastifile can help organizations address the compatibility, mobility, and scalability challenges that come with cloud adoption and expansion.
Q: Can you provide us a brief overview of Elastifile? How and when did the company get its start?
Jerome McFarland, the VP of Marketing at Elastifile
A: Elastifile was founded in 2013 by a team of technology veterans who identified a crucial emerging need in the IT landscape. They foresaw that, to effectively leverage the opportunities and advantages available in the cloud era, a new class of modern data management solutions would be required. These solutions, unlike traditional on-premises storage products, would need to be designed for the requirements of the cloud era. Leveraging their decades of deep technical expertise in areas such as storage, virtualization, flash, and application optimization, the Elastifile founders set out to do just that.
Q: What are your company’s goals? What types of industries do you serve and who are your current customers?
A: Elastifile is focused on enabling enterprise cloud adoption by delivering enterprise-grade, scalable file services in the public cloud. With the Elastifile solution, organizations can shift or burst data-centric workloads to the public cloud (e.g. for consolidation or acceleration) without changing their existing file-based applications and workflows and without succumbing to cloud vendor lock-in. This allows enterprises to seamlessly leverage cloud infrastructure and services to enhance and accelerate a broad range of data-driven workflows in industries including: Life Sciences, Media & Entertainment, Financial Services, and Manufacturing. Elastifile also supports customers in various other domains requiring scalable, cloud-based file storage.
Q: Today’s modern, dynamic businesses are shifting away from on-site deployments and moving their data and mission-critical applications to the cloud…but what does it really entail?
A: Shifting or bursting to the cloud necessitates careful consideration of the requirements of the associated workflow(s). Cost, scale, and performance needs should all be considered. Then, corresponding, practical strategies for cloud-integration must be designed. These strategies should cover the critical associated IT elements (e.g. Compute, Storage, Networking) and leverage solutions with the appropriate cloud-centric attributes and features.
Q: As a key enabler for a successful cloud journey, what do you think are the most crucial factors for a smooth and seamless cloud deployment?
A: Understanding the requirements of the target workflows, planning strategically (both for the near-term and the future), and designing a robust cloud-integrated architecture are the most crucial factors to a smooth and seamless cloud deployment. In addition, leveraging available options for simple, fast, and automated deployment (e.g. deploying Elastifile storage via GCP Marketplace) can also simplify cloud evaluation and implementation.
Q: What are some common challenges that early adopters of public cloud have faced?
A: The ability to efficiently manage data, though not typically the first consideration, often emerges as a crucial requirement for effective cloud integration. As a result, organizations should consider their data compatibility, data management, data scaling, and data mobility needs upfront, and then select appropriate solutions. Otherwise, even the most elegant cloud-integrated architectures can fall victim to the bottlenecks and inefficiencies created by ineffective, inadequate storage implementations.
Q: The advent of cloud computing has given rise to trends such as enterprise mobility and big data, which drive the demand for bigger digital storage capacity. As a trusted cloud-based storage service provider, how can you meet the growing demand for enterprise-class file storage in the cloud? And how does cloud backup differ from cloud storage?
A: Elastifile enables organizations to scale file storage seamlessly to match the evolving needs of their business. As workflows require more capacity or performance, Elastifile storage clusters can grow accordingly on demand. Designed for the cloud as a fully-distributed, scale-out file system, the Elastifile Cloud File System (ECFS) eliminates the scalability and data management headaches that plague traditional storage solutions.
Also, unlike specialized backup storage products, Elastifile was designed for use as primary storage in the cloud. Elastifile was designed to support transactional application workloads in the cloud while delivering the features expected of an enterprise NAS. The corresponding capabilities enable a broad range of use cases beyond backup.
Q: What makes Elastifile stand out from other cloud storage service providers? What tools, features, and platforms does Elastifile offer to support pre-existing enterprise applications and workflows?
Elastifile provides a complete solution enabling organizations to seamlessly shift/burst workflows to the public cloud.
A: Elastifile is uniquely providing enterprise-grade, scalable, cloud file services with support for all three major public clouds. Unlike traditional storage solutions designed for on-premises environments, Elastifile was designed to support the scalability and elasticity (of capacity, performance, and cost) expected in the cloud. Elastifile also provides a complete set of enterprise storage features (e.g. snapshots, high availability, compression, deduplication, etc.), enabling pre-existing applications and workflows to leverage cloud infrastructure without being refactored.
Finally, via its CloudConnect capability, Elastifile delivers seamless data mobility between file and object storage, while retaining all of the data associated with the file system (e.g. hierarchies, links, etc.). This enables both 1) efficient, bi-directional data motion between existing on-premises file storage and cloud infrastructure and 2) cost-optimized in-cloud data management, blending the best attributes of both file storage and object storage.
Q: Tell us a bit more about Elastifile’s cross-cloud data fabric. How can this solution help organizations unify all storage as well as free data from any underlying infrastructure?
A: When combining the scalability and enterprise feature set delivered by the Elastifile Cloud File System with the data mobility delivered by Elastifile CloudConnect, Elastifile’s solution represents a cross-cloud data fabric. Deployable in the public cloud, on-premises, or spanning hybrid-/multi-cloud environments, Elastifile allows organizations to flexibly manage data in alignment with the needs of their businesses.
For example, in some cases, business needs may dictate bursting workflows to cloud to augment data processing capabilities (e.g. by leveraging elastically scalable compute resources or specialized cloud services). In other cases, business needs may dictate cloud-based aggregation of data for synchronization and sharing between geo-distributed on-premises sites. Elastifile provides the flexibility to support these use cases and many more.
In addition, Elastifile integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes to deliver scalable, persistent storage for containers. As a result, organizations can now complement the unified application management and mobility delivered by Kubernetes, with Elastifile’s unified data management and cross-environment data mobility.
Q: Elastifile aims to solve the data-centric compatibility, mobility, and scalability challenges inhibiting cloud adoption and expansion. Can you share some additional information about your enterprise-grade distributed file system? What sets this apart from other products in the market?
The Elastifile Cloud File System delivers the compatibility, scalability, and feature set required to support enterprise workflows in the public cloud.
A: The Elastifile Cloud File System was uniquely designed to meet the needs of enterprise organizations in the cloud era.
Designing for the cloud meant supporting the scalability and flexibility expected by cloud users. These considerations manifest themselves at all levels of the Elastifile solution…from our user-facing capability to elastically resize clusters to support any capacity or performance requirement…all the way down to our fully-distributed underlying architecture which solves challenges (e.g. scale-out metadata management) that limit the capabilities of traditional storage solutions that were designed for on-premises environments.
Designing for enterprise usage meant supporting a full set of enterprise features (e.g. Elastifile’s snapshots, high availability, data reduction, and data monitoring features), providing seamless compatibility with existing applications and workflows (i.e. via Elastifile’s POSIX-compliant file system), and delivering data mobility to the enterprise environment of choice (i.e. via Elastifile’s CloudConnect capability).
Elastifile is the only solution designed to support this combination of capabilities and, thus, stands apart from other storage products.
Q: News about companies losing millions of dollars as a result of massive data leaks or breaches adds to the security concerns that today’s organizations may have about public cloud. As experts in cloud-based storage and data management, how can Elastifile address these challenges? What strategies can you offer to help organizations reduce, prevent, and even avoid data breaches in the cloud?
A: Today, the security provided in the public cloud generally surpasses the security available in any typical on-premises environment. This is a result of the vast resources and expertise that public cloud vendors have devoted to this critical aspect of the cloud experience. That said, Elastifile provides organizations with control over their data. Leveraging the Elastifile solution, organizations have the flexibility to shift/burst data-driven workflows to cloud at their own pace, according to their comfort level.
Q: What can we expect from Elastifile in the coming years? Are there any developments and/or projects that you are brewing?
A: You can expect a lot from Elastifile in the coming years. We’re constantly evolving our solution to further simplify and enhance the enterprise cloud experience. Along those lines, you can expect to hear more about features, integrations, and partnerships in support of that mission. The best way to stay up to speed on our latest and greatest is to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. Stay tuned.
About Elastifile
Elastifile helps organizations adapt and accelerate their business in the cloud era. Powered by a dynamically scalable, enterprise-grade distributed file system with intelligent object tiering, Elastifile’s cross-cloud data fabric solves the data-centric compatibility, scalability, and mobility challenges inhibiting cloud adoption and expansion. With Elastifile, organizations can seamlessly leverage cloud resources to optimize critical workflows, with no application refactoring required…thereby modernizing their infrastructure and achieving their crucial IT agility and efficiency goals.
Elastifile is based in Santa Clara, California and Herzliya, Israel, with global Sales and Marketing offices in North America and Europe, and R&D in Israel. Founded in 2013, Elastifile is backed by Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, CE Ventures, and seven strategic investors from the cloud, data center, and storage industries, including Dell EMC, Cisco, and Western Digital.