Software-defined networking startup Plexxi Inc. is bolstering its coffers with a $35 million funding round announced this morning that saw existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners increase their stakes. But the biggest chunk of the capital came from a new backer that has chosen not to reveal its identity.

It’s perhaps a vendor that would rather not have competitors catch wind of its interest in Plexxi’s technology, which consolidates the different kinds of switches that make up the typical corporate network into a single box. That not only saves space and power but also provides administrators with a uniform building block they can easily add more of as their requirements grow over time.

The individual benefits of Plexxi’s approach add up to make management a lot more straightforward than in traditional implementations. But not all of the credit goes to the hardware. Also playing a big part is the administration software running on top, which the startup says provides an interface for directly translating workload requirements into operational parameters.

That has historically involved painstakingly reconciling details across different levels of abstraction, which takes up time administrators can better spend elsewhere and makes organizations much slower in adjusting their infrastructure to workload changes. Plexxi claims that its approach does away with most of that hassle and significantly cuts operational overhead in the process.

The new funding will enable the startup to invest more in engineering to flesh out that value proposition and step up customer acquisition efforts. The investment brings its total raised to an impressive $83 million, more than most of the other software-defined networking startups to have cropped up in recent years.

Photo via Plexxi