Qumulo Inc., a fast-growing storage startup that counts three of the world’s five largest companies as customers, today announced that it has nabbed a sizable $93 million funding round to keep expanding.

The investment saw the participation of several high-profile backers. Wall Street giant BlackRock Inc. led the round with participation from the Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Western Digital Corp. and four existing investors. Qumulo’s total outside funding now stands at over $222 million.

The Seattle-based startup’s flagship product is a file-based data management platform called the Qumulo File Fabric, or QF2. The software is touted as being capable of storing a billion or more records thanks to a scale-out architecture that can distribute data across over a large number of machines. Those machines may be located either in a company’s on-premises data centers or the public cloud.

Besides handling the logistics of storing supersized data troves, Qumulo claims that QF2 also eases the task of managing them. One of the ways the software does so is by giving administrators a clearer view of what’s happening in their deployments.

In a storage environment that contains, say, a billion-plus files, keeping an eye on important events, including potential problems, is tricky because of the sheer volume of data involved. Having the system individually check the status of so many records is a sluggish process. Qumulo claims that QF2 overcomes this challenge by using “metadata summaries” generated from the information that its software can analyze more easily.

The result, according to the startup, is a real-time view of operations that allows administrators to see important changes faster. Operations teams can act on this information using a capacity management tool that Qumulo says likewise works in real time.

Alongside the standalone edition of QF2, the startup also provides a number of storage arrays that come with the software preinstalled. Qumulo claims to be seeing “triple-digit” year-over-year growth and boasts that its platform already helps manage hundreds of petabytes of data.

Qumulo Chief Executive Officer Bill Richter offered some insight into what’s next for his company in a statement. “Our customers are demanding a fundamentally different approach to managing and storing the large and dispersed data that their businesses rely on,” he said. “The capital … secures our plans for continued expansion, accelerated product capabilities and long-term company sustainability.”

Image: Qumulo