Just as declining memory prices have given rise to new analytics solutions that avoid the reliance of traditional data processing software on cheaper but slower spinning disk, so is the increasing accessibility of flash driving a shift to faster architectures over in the storage arena. The newest player that is trying to seize the trend is Israel-based Elastifile Ltd., which secured $35 million in funding this morning to hurry along its plans.

The startup will use the capital to ramp up marketing around its namesake offering, a standalone software solution that promises to provide organizations with the ability to aggregate the flash drives attached to their servers into a centrally-accessible pool of capacity. It’s the same value proposition offered by EMC Corp.’s ScaleIO technology, which it obtained through the acquisition of another Israeli outfit, but with a few important differences.

Whereas the storage giant’s software and other leading alternatives like the open-source Ceph only offer a limited number of data access options, Elastifile says that its platform is able to expose information in all three of the formats most commonly used among enterprises. That enables the solution to support a broad range of use cases spanning from conventional virtualized applications to high-speed analytics. The startup will offer support for an equally wide variety of management solutions and flash storage variants in order to enable every customer to tailor their deployment according to their specific requirements.

Elastifile claims that its software can thereby provide a full-featured storage environment at a price point as low as 50 cents per gigabytes in certain configurations, which is significantly cheaper than traditional all-flash solutions and even some disk-based equipment. The pitch has convinced no fewer than six “data center and server industry leaders” to participate in the startup’s new $35 million round, all of which decided to go unnamed. But their identities will likely be revealed soon enough given that such strategic investments tend to be followed by high-profile partnership agreements. 

The funding round also saw contributions from private equity majors Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, which led Elastifile’s previous last year. All told, the startup has raised a respectable $44 million since hitting the scene early last year.

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