The new managed service, operated by Elastifile, but with a Google UI and Google billing of the customer, is the product of a deep collaboration between the two companies.

Hybrid cloud data management vendor Elastifile is announcing the further expansion of their partnership with Google, with the introduction of a fully-managed, scalable file storage service for Google Cloud Platform.

“We’ve partnered with Google to deliver the first fully managed scalable file storage service on the Google Cloud Platform [GCP], which is fully integrated with the Google Infrastructure,” said Jerome McFarland, Elastifile’s VP of Marketing. It further extends the April public launch of Elastifile that saw them become the first shared file system on the Google Cloud Launcher.

“At that point, you still managed the infrastructure beneath that storage,” McFarland said. “This is a fully managed service offering, with full integration with Google, that provides a Google user interface and single billing.”

Elastifile’s availability on GCP provides an enterprise-grade NFS file server alternative for GCP to Google’s own single load filer, which lacks ElastiFile’s scalability. Its availability now as a managed service enables it to be positioned with Google’s offering, depending on the use case.

“This is complementary to Google Cloud File Storage,” McFarland said. “Theirs is for smaller deployments. Ours is for scalable capacity. It provides Google with a robust complete portfolio, and we will jointly position these services side by side.”

The complementary nature of the services meant that Elastifile enjoyed deep collaboration with Google to facilitate deep integration with the Google Cloud infrastructure.

“Our teams worked closely together to do this,” McFarland indicated. “Google considers us a First Class Citizen, so we get special access to the APIs to deliver what is essentially a Google native service. That Google native aspect differs from what others have done, and what we ourselves did here before. The key is that this is a managed service, where we manage the infrastructure service behind the scenes, but the customer gets a bill from Google. It’s an Elastifile service, but co-engineered with Google because of our First Class Citizenship.”

The Elastifile Cloud File Service is available at three service levels using consumption-based pricing – at $0.10/GB/month, $0.17/GB/month and $0.30/GB/month.

“The first two tiers use our ClearTier technology, which has been leveraged to blend performance storage with the low cost of object storage,” McFarland said. “The latter tier, for the highest SLAs, uses SSD persistent disks.”

“We see thee Elastifile Cloud File Service as unlocking new enterprise use cases – in media and entertainment, manufacturing, life sciences and traditional enterprise,” McFarland said. “No storage admin is required because we do all the provisioning and managing, and it supports  full enterprise features. It is also well suited for cloud-native architectures like Kubernetes and Kubeflow. Kubeflow – Kubernetes and TensorFlow together – is being increasingly used for training as more training data gets pushed into the cloud. This also works well in use cases like providing resilience for pre-emptible cloud VMs to mitigate the risk of VMs being pre-empted.” Other use cases are HPC file storage, and scalable NAS for cloud-native services like SAP on Google Cloud.

“All these workloads can leverage managed file storage, and this enables its consumption in a way that is simpler than before,” McFarland stated.

Elastifile supports all three large public clouds, although their closeness with Azure has lagged the other two. However, this extension of the Google relationship definitely seems to make Google a first among equals, for the moment anyway.

“We consider ourselves to be cloud-agnostic,” McFarland said. “However, while we definitely still support all three clouds, we are deepening our support for Google. We see this as an answer to what AWS provides in their cloud with EFS.”

Customers can sign up for early access to the new service at https://www.elastifile.com/early-access-gcp.