Replacing departmentalized information silos with a centralized data lake is a great way to make a large organization’s records accessible to its users in theory, but tends to prove near impossible to implement in practice. That gap between need and availability is what Peaxy Inc. hopes to fill with the help of the $15 million investors poured into its coffers this morning.

The startup is one of several that emerged over recent years to tackle the lack of viable options for sharing information among the disparate parts of a globally distributed enterprise, a challenge that is only becoming more pressing as analytics grow increasingly important to decision-making. They all offer variations of the same concept: an index that catalogs data in disparate storage systems to let users find records without having to put everything in one place first.

But Peaxy’s Hyperfiler takes a much more infrastructure-centric approach than the rivaling engines from Alation Inc. and the likewise recently funded Tamr Inc., allowing administrators to move indexed information to the most appropriate hardware for their use cases. That opens up a whole world of possibilities for optimizing data accessibility.

An analyst at a remote region who frequently finds themselves working with information stored in their organization’s main data center could use Hyperfile to have the relevant records copied to a closer facility in order to reduce latency. And a colleague in charge of creating complex business forecasts would be able to place their data on flash storage to speed up compile times and thus gain the ability to make revisions faster.

Hyperfiler employs a patented file tracking technique that allows its catalog to preserve access to records even when they’re moved among storage arrays and applications. But organizations can make up to four copies of their information – including the index itself – just in case a dataset does become unavailable due to a hardware problem, at which point the platform simply reaches for the nearest backup.

The new $15 million round, which was led by a group of individual investors including microprocessor pioneer Federico Faggin, will be used to expand that value proposition. Peaxy didn’t go into more detail, but one aspect of Hyperfiler likely to benefit from the funding is file support, which is currently limited to Microsoft Office, HTML, PDF and AutoCAD formats.

Image via Peaxy