Datrium Inc., a well-funded contender in the hybrid cloud infrastructure market, today announced that it has secured a new $60 million round led Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.

The investment brings the startup’s total raised to a hefty $170 million. In addition to Samsung, it included contributions from Icon Ventures, NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Icon Ventures general partner Michael Mullany, a former vice president at VMware Inc., is joining Datrium’s board as part of the round.

Datrium has carved out a niche for itself with a data management platform called DVX. The startup sells the software in a standalone edition that can run in the cloud and with preconfigured systems. These machines are essentially hyperconverged infrastructure appliances with a twist.

A traditional HCI system combines compute resources and direct-attached storage drives with management software in an integrated package. Datrium’s appliances are based on the same concept, except they only use the direct-attached drives to hold the most frequently accessed data in a deployment. Everything else is relegated to separate storage infrastructure.

According to Datrium, this approach provides more scalability than traditional systems. The separate storage infrastructure can be scaled independently as a company’s data requirements change, which is not possible with traditional HCI appliances since all their components are in a single chassis. The result, according to the startup, is that customers gain more flexibility when it comes to addressing workloads’ data requirements.  

Companies that run DVX on-premises can also set up the software on Amazon Web Services to create an off-premises backup environment. According to Datrium, the platform can provide an up to tenfold reductions in AWS infrastructure costs.

To enhance its value proposition further, the startup last month introduced a service called CloudShift for managing data protection operations. The offering enables administrators to control how backups across both cloud and on-premises infrastructure.

Today’s funding round will enable Datrium to keep building out its product portfolio, as well as expand adoption. The startup claimed its software is used by a wide range of organizations across the private and public sectors, including a few Fortune 100 firms.

Datrium co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Sazzala Reddy spoke to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, a few weeks at the VMworld conference:

Photo: SiliconANGLE