File storage is a staple for a wide range of computing jobs, from traditional business applications such as SAP SE’s to rendering movies and design electronic components. Today, Google LLC is allying with Elastifile Ltd. to bolster the file storage capabilities of its cloud computing platform.

In particular, the two companies announced the availability of Elastifile’s Cloud File Services as a fully managed services on Google Cloud Platform. It’s intended to offer so-called scale-out storage, which means potentially massive storage distributed across many machines in the way the many big-data workloads are handled.

The alliance is interesting because Google already offers its own file service called Cloud Filestore. But Dominic Preuss, director of product management at Google Cloud, said in an interview that use cases for Cloud Filestore are “very basic” and don’t address the scale-out needs that Elastifile’s Cloud File Service can, up to petabytes on demand.

Moreover, Preuss said, “when we talk to customers, they’re really looking for managed services.” Elastifile Chief Executive Erwan Menard told SiliconANGLE that “you don’t need to be a storage nerd” to scale up, say, SAP applications very quickly from 50 terabytes to 100 terabytes and then scale it back down as needed.

The companies said the integration is deep, offering a native Google Cloud experience with the same user interface, monitoring, billing and support. The Elastifile service will be available on Google’s Cloud Marketplace. Menard said the integration is deeper than Elastifile has done with other clouds.

Menard said there are three basic use cases for the Elastifile service: rendering movies, providing persistent storage for workloads in software containers, which are used to allow applications to run unchanged in multiple computing environments in data centers or clouds, and moving SAP applications such as NetWeaver and HANA to the public cloud (pictured).

Pricing varies based on capacity and performance from 10 to 30 cents a gigabyte per month.

The announcement comes a week ahead of Google’s annual Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, where many more services and partnerships are expected to be announced.

Image: Google