Google to acquire Elastifile

We are very excited to announce that Google has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Elastifile, a provider of scalable, enterprise file storage for the cloud. The acquisition of Elastifile is expected to be completed later this year and is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals. Upon the close of the acquisition, Elastifile will join Google Cloud.

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. 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. 

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. 

“The integrated circuit (IC) design  process can produce a wide spectrum of compute and storage requirements,” said Naidu Annamaneni, CIO and VP of Global IT at eSilicon. “This can translate into thousands of cores and petabytes of storage for some portions of the IC design. The combination of Elastifile and Google Cloud provides the scale and performance that we need to successfully deliver these ICs on time and on budget.”   

The combination of Elastifile and Google Cloud will support bringing traditional workloads into GCP faster and simplify the management and scaling of data and compute intensive workloads. 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. 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 training need speed and consistency; and manufacturing, where jobs like semiconductor design verification can be accelerated by parallelizing the simulation models. 

"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 Erwan Menard, CEO at Elastifile. “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."

Earlier this year, we launched Elastifile File Service on GCP, a fully-managed version of Elastifile integrated with Google Cloud. Customers like Appsbroker, eSilicon and Forbes have already taken advantage of the latest Elastifile solutions on GCP. 

“In recent years, we’ve seen enterprises increasingly deploy traditional applications as well as new performance sensitive applications to the cloud,” said Deepak Mohan, Research Director at IDC.  “These applications require on-premises level of performance for latency and consistency alongside of the scalability benefits of the cloud. The acquisition of Elastifile will better enable Google Cloud customers to meet this mix of needs, as they deploy such workloads to the Google Cloud Platform.” 

Google Cloud is committed to our storage partner ecosystem, providing customers the choice of solutions that best fit their needs. The acquisition of Elastifile extends our current file storage offering, Cloud Filestore, and our robust third party partner offerings to support applications from website hosting to computer chip design. We can’t wait for our customers to benefit.