Container storage company Portworx Inc. reckons it’s time to play with the big boys after landing a $27 million round of funding that almost doubles the total amount it has raised to date.

The Series C round, led by Sapphire Ventures and the venture arm of the Mubadala Investment Co., with participation from Mayfield Fund, GE Ventures, Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and NetApp Inc., brings Portworx’s total funding to $55.5 million.

The round comes as Portworx announced the latest version of its flagship platform, called Portworx Enterprise, which will add new disaster recovery and data security features when it becomes available at the end of the month.

PX-Enterprise is Portworx’s cloud-native storage product for Kubernetes, which is the most widely used tool for managing software containers. Developers use software containers to build modern applications because they offer a considerable advantage by abstracting away the underlying hardware and operating system, allowing those apps to run on any computing platform.

PX-Enterprise provides scalable storage for container workloads by transforming commodity Intel Corp. x86 server hardware into a converged storage node that can scale across clusters and automatically provision itself. The idea is that enterprises can use PX-Enterprise to make it easier to provision the storage resources needed by their container apps. Users can manage their storage requirements on a per-container basis.

On the security side, the new release of Portworx Enterprise adds role based access controls focusing on authentication, authorization and data ownership. With regard to disaster recovery, the platform gains an entirely new feature called PX-DR that helps enterprises to safeguard company data in the event of any problems with their local public cloud provider.

Customers can now rely on three levels of high availability and data protection for applications that use Portworx’s storage platform. Data can be backed up within a single data center or across multiple availability zones, across data centers or clouds within a metropolitan area and across data centers spanning the world.

The update and funding come amid strong momentum for Portworx, which said it has more than doubled its customer base in the last year with the addition of heavyweight clients such as HPE. The company also saw its bookings grow by 376 percent in the last year.

Portworx said that’s just the beginning of its growth, and it has its sights set on further expansion. The company said it will use the capital its raised to fuel its expansion into new markets and add yet more features to its platform.

Image: Portworx