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Santa Clara, Calif. technology startup Elastifile launched a data storage platform today that combines the high-performance characteristics of flash with the scalability and flexibility of the cloud.

The company's offering, dubbed the Elastifile Cloud File System, is "hardware agnostic [and] optimized for flash," Amir Aharoni, CEO and co-Founder of Elastifile, told InfoStor. Moreover, the cloud-enable storage platform is not aimed at the "secondary storage and backup" requirements of organizations that are commonly relegated to the cloud, but rather their mission-critical workloads, he added.

The technology draws from the know-how of its executive leadership, which hails from companies that helped pave the way for the advanced networking, flash storage and virtualization technologies used in today's modern data centers.

Elastifile was founded in 2013 by Aharoni, formerly of Mobixell Networks and Optibase, and current CTO Shahar Frank, co-founder of enterprise flash storage pioneer XtremIO, which was acquired by EMC in 2012. Fellow co-founder Roni Luxenburg was an executive at virtualization specialist Qumranet, which was snapped by Red Hat, and Pentacom, a Cisco acquisition.

To date, the company has raised more than $50 million, including a $35 million Series B funding round in early 2016. Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Cisco and Western Digital are among the company's backers. Early customers include Innova, Sigma Vista and the European Bioinformatics Institute.

Flash storage and cloud computing may have gained mainstream acceptance, but their potential to power elastic infrastructures, in which data can move around in an unencumbered and on-demand manner, remains unfulfilled, according to Andy Fenselau, vice president of marketing at Elastifile. The reality is that despite software-defined methods and other advances, data remains trapped in traditional storage arrays, newer hyperconverged appliances and other silos for many enterprises, he said.

Elastifile Cloud File System, using the company's Cross-Cloud Data Fabric technology, helps usher businesses into more of a self-service model, a "world where applications and their data can move dynamically across sites, across clouds," Fenselau. "Users are in charge."

The product employs the Bizur consensus algorithm, a patented distributed metadata model and adaptive data placement techniques, to provide cloud-enabled storage services that are capable of handling transactional workloads with latencies in the one- to two-millisecond range.

Crucially, Elastifile enables businesses to "lift and shift" or cloud-burst their applications without refactoring them, Aharoni said. Elastifile supports the "big three" cloud providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. A single, global namespace helps streamline management. Data deduplication and compression is included at no cost.

Elastifile Cloud File System is available now. Pricing is based on a consumption-based subscription model that spans both on-premises and cloud storage managed by Elastifile.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

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Elastifile Harnesses the Flash Storage and the Cloud for Hybrid Workloads - Enterprise Storage Forum