Google buys Elastifile

Google is buying Elastifile and its scale-out cloud file storage software for an undisclosed sum.

The company said it will integrate Elastifile’s technology and people with Google Cloud Filestore.

In April 2019 Google endorsed Elastifile’s Cloud File Service for its Google Cloud Platform despite operating its own competitive Cloud Filestore offering.

Elastifile’s software runs on-premises and in the Google and AWS clouds.

Elastifile product schematic

Petabyte era

In its acquisition announcement Google said: “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.”

Elastifile was founded in Israel in 2014 It has accumulated up to $71m in funding, including $16m in 2017.One report in Israel suggested Google paid $200m, which would be a goodish exit for Elastifile’s VCs.

The Elastifile acquisition is expected to close later this year. Google is making the acquisition through its Google Cloud business, run by CEO Thomas Kurian.

Google bought Looker for its analytics technology business June for $2.6bn and Kurian is moving fast to strengthen the GCP Offering.