DataGravity Inc. has raised a healthy $50 million in funding from the venerable Accel Partners and several other venture capital giants to promote its hybrid storage arrays. The series is said to be the first in the industry to include built-in data analytics functionality.

That unique approach is the brainchild of industry veterans Paula Long and John Joseph, who had previously worked together at the helm of EqualLogic Inc., the array maker that Dell acquired in 2011 for $1.4 billion to jump-start its storage strategy. The founders have taken an entirely different approach with their latest venture, shifting the focus from simplifying hardware deployment and maintainenance to helping organizations get more out of the information kept inside.

This ambition materialized in the Discover systems that the startup launched earlier this year, which implement a homegrown data management system that scans activity patterns to distinguish important material from potentially redundant or outdated files. That automatic monitoring has the added benefit of providing a centralized view for keeping track of who views what and when, according to DataGravity, which is useful both for enforcing access controls and auditing purposes.

To make that information more reachable, the platform also packs a search feature that can rapidly scan through logs for the access history with a particular end-user, personally identifiable information or any other specific piece of data that an organization may require. But that’s just the tip of the analytic iceberg.

DataGravity also offers capabilities for turning that raw information into tangible insight, most notably a correlation engine that displays relationships between people and activities to help business users locate the professional within their organization most qualified to help them handle a certain file. That intelligence comes in addition to the usual operational services, including integrity checking and data protection.

The approach that DataGravity is taking with its arrays goes against the broader industry trend of storage features moving up the stack from the hardware to the software layer, but one wouldn’t be able to tell that from the rate at which organizations are flocking to the startup. Several organizations including two law firms and a retail have reportedly deployed Discovery arrays in their environments since the series launched in September, which is impressive in a market as heavily saturated as enterprise storage.

The new $50 round is DataGravity’s third in two years, brings its total raised to $92 million. Most of the earlier capital came from Andreessen Horowitz, CRV and General Catalyst Partners, which also contributed to the financing. Their representatives on the startup’s board are now joined by Ping Li of Accel Partners, who had previously led investments in rivaling hybrid array vendor Nimble Storage Inc. and Primary Data Inc.

DataGravity intends to spend the new funding on expanding go-to-market activities and engineering operations, whichich could signal that more Discovery models are in planning. The very minimum, the underlying software will become even more intelligent than it is now