Amplidata announced that it has raised $8 million in a third round of funding from investors Big Bang Ventures, Endeavour Vision, Swisscom and Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s VC branch. The Belgium-based company makes object storage solutions specifically designed to handle unstructured info – i.e big data.

The sales pitch breaks down to several elements: scalability is a very big emphasis, alongside high throughput (and of course, scalable high throughout). These are essential when managing large datasets. Amplidata also promises a sharper reduction in overall power consumption than other multi-copy cloud storage architectures, along with a self-healing functionality that even earned its own name: BitSpread.

“Amplidata’s BitSpread technology provides an ultra-high throughput implementation of erasure coding to optimize data healing and durability. This key component of the AmpliStor solution enables deployment in throughput sensitive applications in a wide range of industries such as Media & Entertainment, in addition to big data archiving applications.”

Intel is all about the cloud and big data.  One of the most recent examples was the acquisition of QLogic’s InfiniBand unit in a deal that totaled about $125 million. And it also looks like the chip maker is digging deep into mobile as well. This is an area where Intel has a relatively small share compared with some of its competitors, which is why it has been investing rather extensively in this market lately.

A few months ago Intel Capital participated in the $18 million funding round of mobile payment gateway operator MFoundry, following an investment in Insyde. The latter makes firmware for Android, the default OS Intel has decided to focus on as the key to its official mobile entry, and received $10 million for its Unified Extensible Firmware Interface solutions.