Elastifile Delivers New Hybrid Cloud Data Fabric Appliances
Scale-out all-flash data fabric bundled with servers
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on November 2, 2017 at 2:27 pmElastifile, Inc., the enterprise hybrid cloud data management company, announced that its cross-cloud data fabric software will be integrated with Dell EMC servers to offer the next generation of scale-out NAS storage appliances.
Developed in collaboration with Dell EMC OEM Solutions, the offering is designed to enable a new generation of on-premises and cloud storage solutions for enterprises and service providers, and it can now be purchased through Dell Sales and partners across North America and EMEA.
Based on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, the solution features the Elastifile Cloud File System and CloudConnect cloud transfer and object tiering. It is orderable now in two all-flash models, optimized for performance or capacity, to provide customers with a best-of-breed turnkey appliance experience. Dell Technologies Capital is a strategic investor in Elastifile.
Deployable as all-flash dedicated storage appliances, this new offering provides customers’ on-premises storage workloads with all the cloud benefits of elastic scale-out performance, efficiency, manageability, and cost. Currently supported to 100 scale-out nodes, the performance model features IO/s from 800,000 to 26,000,000 IOPS and bandwidth from 3.6 to 120GB/s, while the capacity model provides 100TB to 3.5PB. Both offer breakthrough linear performance growth with consistent 1-2ms latency, no matter how many nodes are in the cluster, and great advantages in $/IOP/s, $/GB, and overall TCO.
Elastifile delivers the performance, consistency and elastic scalability necessary to support the spectrum of enterprise and service provider workloads. This scale-out appliance is an on-premises and hybrid cloud solution for mixed-workload consolidation and infrastructure modernization, and high-performance NAS for stateful containers and HPC use cases like life sciences, electronic design automation, media and entertainment, and more. This is a combination for enterprise customers, service providers, and value-added resellers looking for a simple, total solution.
“We are delighted to offer our enterprise customers this appliance with Dell EMC OEM Solutions to provide seamless storage and data management across true hybrid clouds,” said Amir Aharoni, CEO and co-founder of Elastifile. “By packaging Elastifile on Dell EMC servers with Elastifile’s hybrid cloud data fabric, our joint customers can easily deploy and elastically expand. This ensures that they always have the capacity and performance they need to enable most demanding scale-out workloads, with integrated cloud connectivity and object tiering.”
The appliance includes the Elastifile license with 3 years of support pre-paid. Sales, service, support and elastic expansion on demand are provided by Dell EMC and its reseller partners.
Comments
In summary, this deal is about selling Dell PowerEdge servers powered by Elastifile ECFS and CloudConnect through Dell sales and worldwide channels.
Two flash configurations are chosen:
- Performance with 800,000 to 26,000,000 IO/ and 3.6 to 120GB/s
- Capacity from 100TB to 3.5PB,
both with 1-2ms latency and 3 years of pre-paid support.
Elastifile confirms as well that the background of founders is a key asset to obtain credibility from investors, partners, then business channels and finally end-users. Players like Elastifile promise and deliver the roadmap. We see so many attempts to disrupt the market, lots of them claim to do it, but finally just a few succeeding.
Elastifile investors are not so common as we find IT vendors such Huawei, Cisco and Lenovo, components companies like Samsung and Micron, classic VCs such Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures Partners (LSVP), CE Ventures, Cisco Investments and investments entities like Dell Technologies Capital and Western Digital Capital (WDC). A pretty good list even if WDC and LSVP have also invested in Avere Systems that can be considered more and more as a competitor with the hybrid cloud trend.
Dell Technologies Capital is an investor since the first round i.e 2014 and for each rounds - A, B and C - this entity has injected some money into Elastifile. Why did Dell invest? And then, why Dell now OEM the solution?
The answer is simple and relies on three key points:
- The technology Elastifile develops, owns and brings to the market is compelling and unique recognizing an opportunity to sell and push more Dell servers.
- The need for a new generation of scale-out NAS able to address multiple challenges in various use cases. Dell still owns and sells Isilon, recognized as one of the best NAS products for specific use cases in media and entertainment, oil and gas, etc. essentially where file and IO sizes are large.
- And HPC storage behavior influenced several segments meaning that Dell must have a solution to answer all these new needs.
You hear me saying that for several months now "the battle is on among a few scalable file storage players" confirming that file access method is still the preferred technique for unstructured data even with some interest for object-based access such S3. For Elastifile providing a file access, it means being POSIX compliant as not all competitors don't follow the same direction.
Again flash is king and having a product thought and designed around it is a key differentiator vs. product that just finally support flash in addition to HDDs.
We also see in that market segment the growing importance of cloud 'connection' to build and enable a hybrid environment. Supporting AWS, Azure and GCP is a must and we notice in several places initiatives to support them. Potentially players without such support are clearly out of the picture. Things such "how to move, copy and protect data with the cloud, provide DR/BC and maintain attractive performance at a good price ratio" are key characteristics. The promise is compelling. Today Elastifile provides a continuous automatic asynchronous replication mode named CloudConnect to evacuate cold/old/inactive data to object storage platforms deployed on-premises or represented by cloud storage services.
For data protection, Elastifile prefers to rely on combining replication and reduction techniques such compression and deduplication.
Like a few other players, Elastifile doesn't use caching for data and metadata and data are fully distributed. The company doesn't use any consistent hashing or hashing technique for data placement. It has also developed its own consensus algorithm named Bizur as Paxos and Raft were not satisfactory.
We expect the start-up to deliver the next natural phase with a global namespace and a global file service across multiple data islands instanced from private or public clouds. This next iteration represents the holy grail for several companies and really creates differences with other players. We estimate that only a few companies who really own a file system IP will be able to go in that direction and Elastifile belongs to this small club.
This deal represents a good opportunity for both players in a highly competitive market.
Tactically the timing is perfect as it’s just announced a few days before SuperComputing 2017 where both Elastifile and Dell will have booth.
It will be interesting to see how other members of the club will react. As mentioned recently we expect WekaIO to announce a similar OEM agreement during SC17. 2018 will be an interesting year for file storage.
Read also:
Start-Up Profile: Elastifile
In software-defined data infrastructure for on-premises, in-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments
by Jean Jacques Maleval | 2017.04.12 | News
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