Stretchy Storage From Elastifile

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Israel-based storage software startup Elastifile presents a first product-- the Elastifile Cloud File System (ECFS), a software-only, flash-native storage system scaling across on-premises and the cloud.

ElastifileThe ECFS is a distributed file system promising linear performance scaling, consistent and low latency and granular check-in/check-out object tiering for data migration and backup. It scales from a minimum 3 notes to thousands (although the company has only deployed 100 so far), with the system using distributed metadata to prevent bottlenecks.

Each participating server, be it on-site, across sites and public cloud, gets a lightweight virtual controller to aggregate server flash storage resources. In turn these are presented to applications as a POSIX-compliant global namespace accessible from every node and complete with end-to-end protection.

Also included is object storage with all required storage services-- namely compression, deduplication and migration. However, the company insists, data is not treated as a single "blob," since ECFS manages data migration and movement services with granular capabilities. Customers can do snapshots to move part of the data, and a data segment can be "checked out" and placed back into the cluster as required.

Elastifile adds the ECFS is compatible with all commodity server hardware and flash servers running on a mix of enterprise- and consumer-grade flash. Thus, one can start with SSDs, then move to NVMe flash and even add 3D Xpoint technology. HPC is supported, with parallelism and high, consistent IOPS for fast random reads and writes of many small files, as are containers and analytics.

The ECFS is available now, and Elastifle says it already has "dozens" of customers using it in on-premises, public cloud and hybrid forms.

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