The software-defined storage market is crowded with dozens of vendors ranging from small startups to well-established incumbents like EMC Corp., but Khosla Ventures believes that there’s still room for one more. The technology investment giant was today named among the contributors to a $40 million round into an outfit called Datera Inc. that promises to provide a more economic alternative to proprietary arrays.

Its namesake block storage platform achieves its edge through the familiar approach of layering advanced management functionality over low-cost commodity servers equipped with direct-attached drives. The Datera Elastic Data Fabric supports several different types of media but places a particular emphasis on flash, with the startup claiming that users are able to keep latency below one millisecond in performance-optimized environments. An organization can also customize the behavior of the platform to ensure that each set of records in its deployment is kept on the most appropriate type of hardware.

The Elastic Data Fabric thereby makes it possible to have infrequently-accessed information like payment logs automatically stored on disk while relegating higher-priority records to servers fitted with speedy flash. According to Datera, the entire process can be managed through a high-level programming interface that doesn’t require administrators to spend any time tinkering with the complex configurations under the hood. For added convenience, the startup’s platform also integrates with popular infrastructure automation systems like OpenStack and Mesos to let organizations manage their storage equipment through the same place as the rest of their hardware.

It’s an appealing value proposition, but hardly a unique one: Practically every other solution in the same category as the Elastic Data Fabric offers a variation of the same formula. Nonetheless, Datera has managed to snag several paying customers in the run-up to its funding announcement this morning. Khosla Ventures, Sun Microsystems Inc. co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim and the other big-name investors who contributed to the round seem to believe that the startup will be able to continue its growth effort even amid the intense competition in the software-defined storage market.

Their confidence can probably be credited in large part to the impressive track record of the startup’s co-founders, who wrote the I/O stack that powers Linux’s data storage component. Datera’s rank and file is equally impressive: Most of its engineers hail from EMC, VMware Inc., Microsoft Corp. and other enterprise technology heavyweights.

Image via Geralt