With the industry’s eyes fixed on the growing rivalry among the top Hadoop distributors, Altiscale Inc. is quietly encroaching into the emerging market for managed implementations of the notoriously complex data-crunching framework. The startup raised an additional $30 million in funding on Tuesday to expand its efforts.

Altiscale is not the first nor the only firm to have come up with the idea of running Hadoop in the cloud. Amazon has been offering an implementation of the project on its infrastructure-as-a-service since 2009 and the industry’s two other largest providers – Google and Microsoft – have since joined the bandwagon along with a host of other players.

But Altiscale claims to set itself apart with a platform that has been built from the ground up to power Hadoop deployments. Founded by Raymie Stata, who played an instrumental role in the development of the framework at Yahoo! during his stint as CTO, the startup offers a full-service package that includes workload monitoring, fault alerting and maintenance. The team is even offering to help organizations tune their environments for optimal resource utilization.

The service itself, meanwhile, provides “unparalleled” uptime guarantees and built-in support for most of the complementary projects in the Hadoop ecosystem, including the Hive data warehouse, Pig abstraction and over half a dozen others. The only provider that offers a comparable combination of ecosystem integration and support is Qubole Inc., which boasts of hosting more than 470 petabytes of data on its hosted Hadoop implementation.

Altiscale CEO Stata told the press that his company currently manages only about half that much data, but the new funding could help turn the tide. The $30 million round from Northgate Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst Partners brings the startup’s total raised to $43 million, more than five times what Qubole has received so far.

The capital will be used to help support growing customer demand and bolster sales, marketing and product development teams. In conjunction with the investment, Altiscale has tapped industry veteran Mike Maciag to lead that expansion as chief operating officer, a capacity in which he will oversee day-to-day operations and all customer-related activities.

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