With the Dell Computer Inc. – EMC merger distracting two of the storage industry’s largest players, ClearSky Data Inc. thinks the time is right to tell enterprise customers that it has a better way to store and manage data.

The company, which went public with its three-tier cloud architecture in August, announced that it has raised $27 million in a Series B investment round led by Polaris Partners, with a strategic investment from Akamai Technologies Inc., which was itself a Polaris-funded venture. Previous investors General Catalyst and Highland Capital Partners also participated in the funding, which brings total investments in the company to $39 million.

ClearSky uses a combination of co-located equipment, private networks and proprietary software to deliver storage performance in the cloud that it says is comparable to that of on-premise gear but at two-thirds less cost.

Polaris, which has assets of about $4 billion and has funded more than 250 companies, said ClearSky’s model “represents the future of enterprise infrastructure.”  The investment by Akamai is significant because that company operates one of the world’s largest distributed computing platforms. That’s a critical link in the chain to ClearSky, which uses co-location facilities near a customer’s data center for its second tier of storage. The primary tier is an on-site appliance that ClearSky manages remotely, and less critical data is stored in Amazon’s S3 cloud.

ClearSky, which is headed by Ellen Rubin, former founder of CloudSwitch Inc., says the service can not only manage a company’s entire storage load more cheaply but also transparently handle data management tasks like de-duplication, backup and disaster recovery. The company has co-location facilities in Boston, Philadelphia and Las Vegas and says it plans to add most major metropolitan areas and also expand outside North America next year.

Watch the CUBEConversations interview with ClearSky co-founders Ellen Rubin and Laz Vekiarides from the company’s launch in August (28:17).

Photo by Bill Damon via Flickr Creative Commons license