In this 7th episode of the TECHunplugged Podcast, hosts Max Mortillaro (@darkkavenger) and Arjan Timmerman (@arjantim) are joined by Jerome McFarland (@JeromeMcFarland), VP of Marketing at Elastifile.

Show schedule:

• 00:00 Intros & presentation
• 01:15 Jerome McFarland introduces Elastifile
• 01:46 Arjan Timmerman returns on the changes at Elastifile: new CEO, collaboration with Google Cloud
• 02:32 Jerome covers the changes and focus of Elastifile following CEO change
• 03:33 Arjan asks to understand what kind of cloud setups are supported by Elastifile
• 04:00 Jerome replies and explains the predominantly public cloud orientation of Elastifile
• 04:55 Arjan asks if that is due to customer base requirements and what about hybrid cloud
• 05:30 Jerome covers the question and discusses a bit about Elastifile customers
• 06:45 Arjan asks about the multi-cloud story
• 07:27 Jerome explains the cloud agnostic approach at Elastifile and the links with Google Cloud
• 08:05 Max wakes up and asks about whether it makes sense to run Elastifile on multiple public clouds simultaneously (for example for DR / replication)
• 08:30 Jerome acknowledges that they predominantly see single cloud deployments, but see a trend where customers also design for multi-cloud from the ground up
• 09:47 Arjan and Jerome talk about data mobility features and how to import data onto Elastifile, covering also the filesystem structure and object format
• 12:10 Max asks about cost efficiencies when data is stored on an Elastifile cloud file system but not actually used
• 12:41 Jerome covers the question and explains the data structure
• 13:26 Arjan asks about the relationship between Elastifile primary scale out file storage solution and the object storage story
• 14:12 Jerome returns on the question, covering the object storage involvement in Elastifile solution delivery, also covers bursting vs continuous use
• 15:40 Arjan whether there are any predominant verticals leveraging Elastifile
• 16:15 Jerome covers the verticals, specifically data-centric use cases, but also Kubernetes support, and Machine Learning
• 17:15 Max returns on data-centric use cases and asks whether Elastifile can be a good platform for HPC based projects
• 17:55 Jerome explains that this is definitely an use case and provides more info on already published information with one of their customers
• 18:30 Arjan asks for Jerome if there is anything we haven’t yet covered in the discussion
• 18:56 Jerome covers the cloud-native origins of Elastifile, explaining that it isn’t a file system design retrofitted for the cloud but built to leverage cloud-native and cloud-scale features while delivering performance
• 20:22 Max asks whether Elastifile have the impression of having displaced specific existing use cases or if these are net new use cases
• 20:55 Jerome explains that it’s a mix of both, new use cases with analytics & containers, and offloading of existing use cases to the cloud
• 21:49 Arjan asks whether customers are coming to Elastifile out from traditional file-based storage systems
• 22:40 Jerome says that there is no specific vendor being displaced and that it’s a broad range of on-premises use cases covered
• 23:30 Wrap up and thanks