Although the slogan “Open Convergence” is displayed prominently on its site and product materials, Datrium Inc. has little to do with the tightly integrated hyperconverged appliances that the phrase evokes.

Instead, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based storage startup is pursuing an entirely different approach to data center hardware — one that has attracted $55 million in new funding from New Enterprise Associates announced today. The Series C round also saw the participation of early Snapchat Inc. backer Lightspeed Venture Partners and a third, unnamed investor.

Datrium will use the capital to widen the adoption of its flagship DVX system, which aims to provide the core benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure in a less converged form.

It consists of two components: A storage appliance called NetShelf that provides up to 180 terabytes of usable capacity and a management stack dubbed Hyperdriver that serves as the brains of the platform. The software is meant to be installed on VMware-virtualized servers with direct-attached flash. DVX reserves 20 percent of the cores on each machine by default, but the number can be increased to 40 percent thanks to a recently added “insane mode” geared towards performance-intensive workloads.

Hyperdriver springs into action once everything in a deployment is properly set up and applications start accessing storage capacity. The software relegates frequently used data on the servers’ direct-attached drives to speed up read operations, which Datrium claims are handled much faster than in all-flash arrays since the information resides closer to the workloads. Data writes, meanwhile, are transmitted over a 10Gb link to the Netshelf appliance.

The data that ends up on the system is managed entirely by Hyperdriver back on the server side. As a result, companies can manage DVX like hyperconverged appliances that have all of their components in the same chassis, except they retain the ability to scale storage and compute separately. This enables organizations to add one resource without having to overbuy the other.

Datrium claims that more than 50 companies have adopted the platform since its launch earlier this year. Among them is Northrim Bank, one of the leading financial institutions in Alaska.

Benjamin Craig, the firm’s chief information officer, stopped by SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE in September to share how his team is using DVX:

Image courtesy of Datrium