The wave of investor interest in storage consolidation reached full circle this morning after Delphix Inc., one of the earliest pioneers of the centralized data management movement, revealed the completion of a hefty $75 million investment from a roster of high-profile backers. The funding ups the ante for the other players that have emerged lately to capitalize on the trend.

The most recent addition to the roster came only last month when Cohesity Inc. exited stealth with $70 million in funding to promote its storage appliance, which offers a unified environment for the so-called secondary data taking up most of the available capacity in the enterprise. And shortly before that, Rubrik Inc. landed $45 million for a similar system that likewise consolidates information into a single a platform to enable unified  management.

Delphix follows the same concept with its data virtualization service technology, but has taken a much more flexible approach to implementing it. Instead of having to move everything to a centralized location, customers are able to create a  “master version” of a file that can be replicated as many times as the number of use cases for which copies are required.

Those clones remain linked to the original, which means that users need only implement changes once in order to modify all the different applications that use the data. That can save a great deal of time for administrators at large organizations with upwards of thousands of different workloads in their environments while avoiding the oversights that are bound to happen in manual updating.

But where that automated propagation truly shines is enforcing operational policies across those copies, which includes placing limits on which application can access what piece of information and deleting duplicate files when they’re no longer used. That pitch has helped Delphix more than double its revenue every year since its exit from stealth 2010,  a figure that has naturally caught investors’ attention.

The biggest portion of the new $75 million in funding came from mutual funds titan Fidelity Management and Research Company, which has previously invested in the likes of Uber Inc., Pinterest Inc. and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX.  The rest of the equity pie is split among Credit Suisse’s NEXT Investors fund, The Kraft Group and existing backers.

Photo via Chris Potter