While traditional storage suppliers are only starting to address the growing amounts of data that companies are moving to the cloud, Nasuni Inc. is looking to build on its foothold in cloud-connected storage.

The Massachusetts-based startup secured $25 million in funding this morning to try to strengthen its position even further. About two-thirds of the capital was provided by Sigma Prime Ventures, while the remaining $7.5 million came in the form of debt financing from Eastward Capital. Though debt financing isn’t always the most desirable form of funding, a spokesperson for Nasuni told SiliconANGLE that the investment was raised from a “position of strength” since the company could reach the break-even point in the foreseeable future if it so desired.

Instead, however, the startup will now focus on scaling operations and widening the adoption of cloud-connected storage filers. The product family consists of five appliances ranging from the desktop-sized NF60 to the beefy NF600, an all-flash model that can support up to 1,000 users. They all ship with a file system called UniFS that Nasuni built to help customers easily tap the low-cost storage resources available from the public cloud.

The software works sort of like the desktop clients that come with services such as Box and Google Drive. UniFS doesn’t simply write data to an array’s built-in storage drives as a traditional file system would, but also syncs them to a central cloud repository that is shared among all the Nasuni appliances in an environment. Users can download the data they require to their local system on-demand for fast access while the rest is kept off-premises.

Nasuni says that its technology can dramatically cut the amount of storage capacity that companies must deploy behind the firewall, which in turn lowers hardware expenses. Management overhead is reduced as well, since storage administrators end up with less on-premises equipment to maintain. According to the startup, companies can control of their NF-series systems through a centralized console that covers everything from capacity provisioning to audits.

Nasuni’s value proposition has already won over customers in about a half-dozen industries, including manufacturing, healthcare and education. The startup claims to have more than 12 petabytes of data under management.

Image courtesy of Nasuni