Fresh off its $2.6 billion purchase of Looker Data Sciences Inc., Google LLC is making another acquisition to bolster its cloud platform.

The search giant today announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to buy Elastifile Ltd., a data storage startup based in Israel and in Santa Clara, California. Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian said the deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

Kurian didn’t disclose the price tag, but Israeli business journal CTech cited an anonymous source as saying Google is paying around $200 million for the startup. That represents a handsome exit for Elastifile’s investors. The company has raised $74 million over three funding rounds from backers including Dell Technologies Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Elastifile sells a file storage system that enterprises can deploy in the public cloud or on their on-premises data center hardware. It simplifies the day-to-day operational tasks involved in handling data storage for applications, such as adding more capacity when information troves grow. In April, the startup brought the offering to Google Cloud as part of a partnership with the search giant that saw the companies implement extensive product integrations.

Today’s acquisition will lead to Elastifile becoming a full-fledged part of Google Cloud. It already is in many respects: The offering is directly integrated into the platform’s management interface, as well as the billing and support systems. Elasitilfe can also run on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s rival public cloud platform, but it’s unclear if that will continue to be the case after the acquisition.

Kurian said Elastifile will enable his group to provide better support for enterprises moving legacy on-premises systems to the cloud. Many traditional workloads, most notably SAP SE’s widely-used business management applications, use file storage.

The deal should also enable Google to better support file-centric workloads already running off-premises. Semiconductor maker eSilicon Corp., for instance, uses Elastifile to store chip designs on Google Cloud. Film studios and other companies in the entertainment sector often maintain large media archives that sometimes contain upwards of millions of files.

Elastifile may end up replacing Google’s existing file storage service, Cloud Filestore. When Google and Elastifile announced their partnership in April, Dominic Preuss, a director of product management at Google Cloud, told SiliconANGLE that the startup’s platform is better-suited to supporting large multipetabyte workloads.

Image: Google