Elastifile, which already has a very close relationship with AWS, deepens their partnership with Google in a way that sees them become the first shared file system on the Google Cloud Launcher.

Today, hybrid cloud data management vendor Elastifile is announcing its public launch on the Google Cloud Launcher [GCL], greatly upgrading the choice of scalable NFS file services on the Google Cloud Platform.

Google Cloud Launcher provides ready-to-go development stacks, solutions, and services to accelerate deployment onto the Google Cloud Platform. Over 160 of these are presently available. However, until now, none of them have included enterprise-grade NFS file services.

“Google Cloud Platform has not had an enterprise-grade scalable filer for easy deployment,” said  Jerome McFarland, Elastifile’s Marketing Director. “We are the first and only shared file system on Google Cloud Launcher. There was the recognition of a need there that wasn’t being filled by anyone else. AWS has EFS [Elastic File System], although it still isn’t at the same level as us on enterprise workflows,  but for Google there was nothing at all. Now, you get two options on GCL – their single load filer, which has no scalable option, and us.”

Elastifile was already a member of the Google Cloud Technology Partner Program. They have been validated for use the with Google Compute Engine, and have worked with customers to bring them onto the GCP before the public availability now being announced.

“We have been seeing strong synergies driving increased collaboration with Google around enterprise applications moving into the cloud,” McFarland said. That in turn has led to Elastifile being added to the GCP recommended File Systems list. “We are doing a GCP Live webinar in early April, and have been chosen to do a main track presentation at Google Cloud NEXT in July.”

McFarland said that the momentum they are seeing with Google is taking the form of specific function use cases, and also being applied to specific verticals.

“We are a great fit with containers,” he said. “They aren’t just microservices any more, and they also need to support data mobility. That’s what we do. We have also seen machine learning become an area with a lot of interest.”

Vertical areas where the Google Cloud is doing well for Elastifile include life sciences, media and entertainment, and electronic design automation.

McFarland cited examples of two customers who they put on the Google Cloud Platform.

“It’s all about the applications and workflows we are enabling,” he said. “Silicon Therapeutics is a life sciences company that works in molecular dynamics for drug discovery. They had to manually manage storage instances in the cloud, which took their IT focus away from the science. Our scalable high-performance system was a perfect match for their multi-stage workflow. They wanted to save object storage models and use them later. Their workloads are very bursting. When they need to do analysis they spin up Elastifile on the Google Cloud Platform, so they only pay for us when they need to use us.”

The other customer – who can’t be named – is in the semiconductor design space. McFarland described them as a Global 1000 customer with very bursty needs for their design data because of heavy duty simulation of applications.

“We replaced NetApp to create software defined on-prem with connectivity to the Google Cloud,” he said. “We can ingest from existing clusters like NetApp and Isilon, to spin them up in the cloud as well. In this vertical, there are lots of semi-conductor design firms that do contract jobs, who don’t make the chips. They just design them. These design houses don’t want to manage IT infrastructure at all, so the cloud here is even more of a perfect fit.”

As a hybrid cloud data management vendor, relationships with the big cloud providers is absolutely central to Elastifile’s go-to-market strategy. They also have a strong relationship with AWS, and are certified as an Amazon Partner Network Technology Partner. Elastifile has also termed the Azure Cloud as critical to their go-to-market, and they support Azure workloads. However, they are not allied with them to the same degree as Google and AWS – not yet anyway.