Thwack... boing: Amazon EFS rival Elastifile flings out multi-cloud file store through Google

Scale-out software filer supplier Elastifile has buddied up with Google to thrust its NAS file system into Mountain View's Cloud Platform.

The firm's file storage service is a rival to EFS, Amazon's Elastic File Store, which has been available since 2016. Google offered its Cloud File Store to beta testers in June this year. At the time, we noted two classes of service:

• Standard costing 20¢/GB/month, 80 MB/sec max throughput and 5,000 max IOPS,
• Premium at 30¢/GB/month, 700 MB/sec and 30,000 IOPS.

Both classes provide a 64TB max capacity share, 99.9 per cent typical availability and support for the NFS v3 protocol.

Elastifile's Cloud File System (ECFS) offers NFS v3/4, SMB, AWS S3 and the Hadoop File System. It provides tiers of service, varying cost and performance, and integrates tiering between file and object. Pricing for provisioned capacity starts at 10¢/GB/month.

It has support for thousands of nodes and file systems/mount points, exabyte capacity levels, and 100,000 users or server clients. Elastifile said it can deliver millions of IOPS at less than 2ms latency, and has tight integration with Google's Cloud infrastructure.

The Israeli firm said: "Effectively, Elastifile's new managed service provides GCP with an answer to AWS's EFS service."

Nan Boden, senior director, Head of Global Technology Partnerships at Google Cloud, said: "Through our collaboration with Elastifile, we will enable a scale-out file service that is a fully managed solution and provides a seamless user experience through integrations with our platform, thus enabling new workloads to move to the Cloud."

A quick review of the main cloud file services shows Elastifile and NetApp have better coverage of the on-premises and public cloud world than other file system software suppliers:

Both Amazon, with Outpost, and Microsoft, with Azure Stack, have on-premises representation. Google does not. Neither Amazon, nor Azure, nor Google have their cloud file services available on other clouds, as you'd expect. None support multi-cloud strategies.

This is where Elastifile and NetApp's Cloud Volumes can both score, providing on-premises support, defences against public cloud lock-in, and workload mobility between clouds. ®