Scale storage out with new Elastifile Cloud File Service for GCP

File storage works great for running traditional applications and achieving the high throughput and performance of compute-heavy workloads, like rendering movies or electronic design automation. It’s been a foundational element of enterprise infrastructure for a very long time. As those applications and workloads move to the cloud, you need the same access to highly available shared storage, but with a managed service experience and scale.

That’s why we are pleased to announce the availability of Elastifile Cloud File Service for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), a fully managed file service integrated with GCP. We’ve been working closely with Elastifile on this effort to bring you scale-out file services that complement our Cloud Filestore offering and help you meet high-performance storage needs. The deep engineering partnership between Elastifile and Google Cloud has resulted in a service that provides:

• A native GCP user experience with monitoring, billing, and support integration
• Petabyte capacity on demand
• Cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing tiers
• The ability to tier data between file and object storage and optimize your price vs. performance
• Multi-zone availability, automated snapshots, and asynchronous replication

Simpler storage management for a broad range of enterprise use cases

A fully managed file service helps eliminate the stress and complexity associated with forecasting, managing, and provisioning enterprise storage. Simplified storage management is particularly helpful with high-performance computing (HPC) jobs like computational fluid dynamics (CFD), seismic analysis, data analytics, machine learning model training, rendering or risk modeling. These are the types of jobs that Appsbroker focuses on at the Extreme Cloud Center of Excellence (ECCoE)—a three-way investment between Appsbroker, Intel and Google Cloud that’s designed to help users of HPC systems benchmark their current workloads.

For Geoff Newell, the Technical Director at Appsbroker Limited (UK), the potential time savings he saw from Elastifile Cloud File Service at the ECCoE is promising. “When using the service, it quickly became clear that Elastifile had delivered a robust, enterprise-grade storage solution, with the performance characteristics our HPC customers require, while still providing an efficient, cloud-native user experience,” Newell said.

In addition to industry-specific workflows, Elastifile’s new service is also well-suited for horizontal use cases such as persistent storage for Kubernetes, data resilience for preemptible cloud VMs and scalable Network Attached Storage (NAS) for cloud-native services. This support helps bridge the gap between traditional and cloud-native workflows, making cloud integration easier than ever before. One common use case is running SAP on Google Cloud. The diagram below illustrates a customer architecture that uses Elastifile to support SAP workflows involving NetWeaver and HANA.

As shown above, Elastifile’s cloud-native file storage serves as the storage backbone for this workflow. When delivered via the new fully managed service, Elastifile also simplifies IT administration by eliminating the complexity associated with manual storage management.

Whether facilitating full-scale lift-and-shift migrations to cloud (e.g., for SAP), providing high-performance storage to support application bursting to cloud, or delivering scalable, persistent storage for Kubernetes, Elastifile’s new managed service provides storage simplicity at scale.

Elastifile Cloud File Service is available now on Google Cloud Marketplace.