Google today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Elastifile, a Santa Clara, California-based provider of enterprise cloud file storage solutions, for an undisclosed price. (CTech cited an anonymous source as saying Google is paying around $200 million.) Assuming the acquisition passes regulatory muster, the search giant expects it to be completed later this year, at which point the Elastifile team will join Google Cloud.
Perhaps uncoincidentally, this news comes on the heels of the launch of Elastifile File Service on Google Cloud Platform, a fully managed version of Elastifile optimized for Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote in a blog post that Elastifle will be integrated with Google Cloud Filestore in the coming months.
“File storage is fundamental to enterprise infrastructure and a priority for customers looking to accelerate their digital transformation. For example, companies who run SAP need access to highly available and consistent file storage. Developers building applications that use Kubernetes need file storage for their stateful workloads,” wrote Kurian. “Elastifile is a pioneer in solving the challenges associated with file storage for enterprise-grade applications running at scale in the cloud.”
Elastifile, which was founded in 2014 by Amir Aharoni, Roni Luxenburg, and Shahar Frank, had raised $74 million in venture capital prior to the acquisition. It develops file storage solutions in Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Azure that are aimed at large corporations. The starup’s software-defined approach to managed Network Attached Storage (NAS) simplifies the management and scaling of data- and compute-intensive workloads, enabling businesses to quickly build high-performance apps at “petabyte-scale.”
Among Elastifile’s spotlight features are multiple service tiers for cost flexibility, hybrid cloud and cross-cloud environment compatibility, snapshots and multi-zone access, and aggregated virtual machine performance and capacity. Additionally, it supports ClearTier, which reduces the cost of object storage with commodity hardware and highly efficient erasure codes.
According to CEO Erwan Menard, Elastifile’s services are particularly useful in industries like media and entertainment, where artists require shared file storage with burst computing capabilities for image rendering, and life sciences, where genomics processing and machine learning model training need “speed” and “consistency.” Manufacturing, where jobs like semiconductor design verification can be accelerated by parallelizing the simulation models, also stands to benefit.
“Helping our customers solve difficult storage challenges for their most critical workloads has enabled these enterprises to unleash the full benefits of the cloud,” said Menard. “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.”
Google’s purchase of Elastifle comes as the tech giant rejiggers its cloud business in an effort to boost profitability. (Google Cloud ranks third in the cloud space behind Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, according to a report from Canalys.) Google last November appointed Kurian, who is a longtime Oracle veteran, to replace previous Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene. And the company in June revealed plans to acquire data analytics company Looker for $2.6 billion.
In Q4 2017, Google disclosed that its cloud business exceeded $1 billion per quarter in revenue. More recently, during an earnings call in April, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that Google Cloud Platform was one of the “fastest-growing” divisions in Google parent company Alphabet.
Source: VentureBeat
