Scalable, High-Performance, Persistent Data Services For Containerized Applications

SOLUTIONS BRIEF

Many enterprises are turning towards containerization technologies as the preferred method to efficiently support their dynamic business process requirements. However, though powerful orchestration tools have emerged to facilitate easy management of containerized applications, data management solutions have lacked corresponding features and flexibility…until now. Elastifile’s high-performance, distributed file system delivers persistent, scalable, highly-available shared access to business-critical container data.

In industries such as Financial Services, Hosted Infrastructure, and Telecom, containerization technologies are being leveraged for a variety of use cases, including analytics, DevOps, and user-level file storage. The associated, lightweight containerized environments can be rapidly created, scaled, and/or removed on demand, significantly enhancing enterprise agility and efficiency. To address the corresponding data-centric considerations, Elastifile has delivered an agile persistence platform that complements the application-level agility enabled by containerization.

Expanding Capabilities Of Containerized Applications As containers have gained popularity within enterprise environments, the ability to provide seamless, scalable data persistence has emerged as a key to enabling their increased adoption. The containerized use cases requiring persistence are numerous and prevalent across a wide range of businesses. Some examples include:

– Data repositories for analytics – Financial analytics “sandboxes” require on-demand access to large amounts of persistent data.

– DevOps synchronization – Software development environments need to both share (e.g. stable source code) and isolate (e.g. code under development) persistent data.

– User data management – Service provider infrastructure must persist and manage large amounts of user-generated content (e.g. photos, videos).

With Elastifile, these containerized use cases can now benefit from the performance, scalability, and reliability inherent to a fully-distributed, elastic file system. When a container persists data to the Elastifile Cloud File System (ECFS), the data will remain highly available to all nodes within the ECFS cluster, even if the container later fails or is migrated to a new location. Therefore, once saved to ECFS, the data can then be accessed by additional authorized containers…for example, by new instances of the original container (e.g. for failure recovery, load-balancing, or scaling) and/or by additional containerized applications that need shared visibility to updates (e.g. for DevOps code synchronization).

Enabling Containerization Of Traditional Enterprise ApplicationsBy delivering a scalable, high-performance persistence layer, Elastifile is also enabling containerization to address new use cases that were previously out of reach. Many traditional applications (e.g. relational databases), rely on persistence for their core functionality. With Elastifile, those applications can now be reliably migrated to containerized infrastructure, thus enabling much simpler, more agile deployment and management.

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Elastifile Expands The Resilience, Scalability, And Shareability Of Containerized Infrastructure, Providing Huge Benefits For A Variety Of Use Cases

About ELASTIFILEElastifile is redefining the way data is stored and managed, enabling seamless deployment of private and hybrid cloud solutions. With enterprises and service providers increasingly seeking to support both on-premises and cloud workflows, Elastifile delivers a revolutionary cross-cloud data fabric that unifies the data across these environments within the single global namespace of a global file/object system. The easy-to-manage, easy-to-deploy, elastic, scale-out architecture intelligently shares the resources across all environments, providing the optimal solution for enterprise data and related application services.

Elastifile was founded in 2013 and is backed by seven market leaders from across the data center and storage industries, Battery Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

2880 Lakeside Dr., Suite 228Santa Clara, CA 95054info@elastifile.com | www.elastifile.com

Elastifile allows containerized infrastructure to scale efficiently with business needs. As new containers are created, each can be assigned an isolated “sandbox” of secure, persistent storage. Data will be globally deduplicated to optimize capacity utilization. Also, since Elastifile supports “hot” node addition/removal and scales performance linearly, containerized infrastructure can be elastically expanded to meet dynamic performance and capacity requirements.

Efficiently Scale Containerized Applications And Data

Example scaling scenario: Each new user/application receives dedicated, capacity-optimized persistent storage

Elastifile enables containerized applications to share a single namespace facilitating instantaneous updates and synchronization. When authorized applications write to the namespace (for example, when pushing source code releases for DevOps), all other applications have real-time visibility and access to the updated data.

Instantly Synchronize Data Across Containerized Applications

Example synchronization scenario: Single data writer, pushes updates to many data readers

Elastifile’s distributed architecture ensures resilience against storage device and/or node failures. When hardware fails, the associated containers can be instantly restarted on a different Elastifile node with no data loss and with no interruption to critical business operations.

Insulate Business Operations From Hardware Failures

Example failover scenario: Container restart policy creates new instance on available node and maintains original, persisted state

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