Google Cloud Buying Elastifile To Extend Enterprise File Storage Services

'The combination of Elastifile and Google Cloud will support bringing traditional workloads into GCP (Google Cloud Platform) faster and simplify the management and scaling of data and compute-intensive workloads,' Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.

Google has an agreement to buy Elastifile to expand Google Cloud’s enterprise file storage offerings, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian announced today in a blog post.

File storage is fundamental to enterprise infrastructure and a priority for customers looking to accelerate their digital transformation, Kurian said, noting that companies that run SAP applications need access to highly available and consistent file storage, and developers building applications that use Kubernetes need file storage for their stateful workloads.

Google intends to integrate Elastifile with Google Cloud Filestore, a managed file storage service for applications that require a filesystem interface and a shared filesystem for data. It’s designed to give users a simple, native experience for standing up managed NAS with their Google Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine instances.

“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,” Kurian said. “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.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a report on the Calcalist website valued the acquisition at approximately $200 million. It’s expected to close later this year, pending regulatory approvals and other conditions.

“The combination of Elastifile and Google Cloud will support bringing traditional workloads into GCP (Google Cloud Platform) faster and simplify the management and scaling of data and compute-intensive workloads,” Kurian said.

“Furthermore, we believe this combination will empower businesses to build industry-specific, high performance applications that need petabyte-scale file storage more quickly and easily,” Kurian said. “This is critical for industries like media and entertainment, where collaborative artists need shared file storage and the ability to burst compute for image rendering; and life sciences, where genomics processing and ML (machine learning) training need speed and consistency; and manufacturing, where jobs like semiconductor design verification can be accelerated by parallelizing the simulation models.”

Elastifile, based in Santa Clara, Calif., and Herzliya, Israel, was founded in 2013 and has raised $74 million in four funding rounds, according to Crunchbase. It’s backed by Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, CE Ventures and seven strategic investors, including Dell EMC, Cisco and Western Digital.

"Helping our customers solve difficult storage challenges for their most critical workloads has enabled these enterprises to unleash the full benefits of the cloud,” Elastifile CEO Erwan Menard said. “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."

Elastifile File Service on GCP, a fully-managed version of Elastifile integrated with Google Cloud, launched earlier this year.

“Support for elastically scalable ‘file storage’-as-a-service is a natural complement to GCP’s elastic compute services,” Menard said.

Elastifile also is partnered with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Kurian, who formally took command of No. 3 cloud provider Google Cloud earlier this year, is seeking to grab more market share as it competes against industry leader AWS and No. 2 Azure.

Last month, the Mountain View, Calif.-based Google announced the first large-scale acquisition under his watch – a $2.6 billion deal to buy business analytics company Looker Data Sciences, which channel partners said would sync with Google Cloud’s multi-cloud approach and courting of enterprise customers.