All-flash hot-shot Elastifile pulls open wallet for big B-round

Israeli high-techers strike again. Elastifile, a startup developing storage software for all-flash arrays, has gained $35m in its second round of funding.

The company was started up in 2014 in Herzliya, Israel, to develop enterprise-class, web-scale storage software running on all-flash media and providing file, object and block storage access protocols. Its technology is hardware and hypervisor-agnostic – sounding like a near-universal storage silo.

Itzik Parnafes, a general partner at funding source Battery Ventures, opened the quote tin and fished this out: “A cost-effective distributed file on flash solution has been a pressing market need. Elastifile’s unique and groundbreaking design presents its customers with the first scalable all-flash system providing file, block and object storage to applications at the backbone of day-to-day data centre operations.”

The B-round was led by Battery Ventures and LightSpeed Venture Partners, who contributed $8m in A-round cash in 2014, together with “six data centre and server industry leaders.” Wonder who they are?

The Elastifile co-founders are CEO Amir Aharoni; CTO Shahar Frank - an XtremIO co-founder; and VP for Research and Development Ronni Luxemburg, an ex-software engineering director at Red Hat. Both Battery V and LightSpeed VP were investors in XtremIO.

Elastifile claims it “delivers flash performance to any and all enterprise applications while reducing the CAPEX and OPEX of virtualised data-centres and private clouds”.

The software supports both OpenStack/KVM environments and VMware vSphere centric deployments as well as Linux Containers. It converges compute and storage resources, runs across thousands of nodes and delivers tens of millions of IOPS at less than 2msecs latency, Elastifile claims.

It can use new and existing enterprise servers fitted with off-the-shelf SSDs, and NVMe or PCIe flash cards. Potential application areas include virtualisation data store, OLTP, NoSQL database, Big Data, real-time analytics, VDI, NAS, private clouds and file-as-a-service (FaaS)

Allon Cohen, Elastifile’s VP for Products and Business development, has written a blog in which he says: “3D flash is about to revolutionise the world of storage changing the economics of flash deployment with a storage component that is both fast and cost effective.”

“As impressive as they are, however, 3D flash chips alone will not revolutionise the world. What is missing is a complementary technology that will turn 3D flash into something that is both practical and safe for the critical data in modern enterprise data centres. Something that will be the catalyst making 3D flash usable for any enterprise, and any application. That technology? Stay tuned….”

Elastifile claims it will provide its storage services on flash to customers ”at a price point below that of many hybrid and hard disk drive-based arrays, while using their choice of hardware. Optimised to existing and new flash and next generation storage devices, Elastifile delivers all-flash performance with unified storage access at a price point of 50 cents per GB ($500 per TB).”

Sounds wonderful. We might see beta software emerge by the end of 2016 or in 2017. The company has a sales and marketing office in San Jose, CA if you want to find out more. ®