SimpliVity Inc. has landed a massive $175 million in funding from a group of investors that includes one of its top customers to help sustain growth amid increasing competition from other converged infrastructure providers. The deal tops off a record year that saw demand for its platform grow fivefold.

The OmniCube combines servers and storage drives from manufacturing partners into a chassis about the size of a large computer case (above right) that can provide up to 24 Intel cores with as much as 30 terabytes of effective capacity. The system sets itself apart from other converged boxes with a custom chip that offloads resource-intensive data optimization operations from the main processors.

That frees up a tremendous amount of computational power for other workloads and removes the longstanding trade-off between consistent performance and storage efficiency in the process. Layered on top is a homegrown management stack that provides capabilities for handling the distribution of data across appliances in a virtualized setting.

That modular architecture allows organizations to easily add more nodes as their workloads grow instead of having to scale servers, capacity and networking equipment separately in the operational equivalent of playing hot potato. That’s how Waypoint Capital LLC, which led $175 million round in SimpliVity, ended up deploying OmniCubes across its five locations.

The Geneva-based holding and investment company is among the 65 percent of customers that the startup says replace the bulk of their infrastructure with its systems, which is quite a feat considering the thinly-stretched nature of enterprise technology budgets. It’s even more impressive given the fact that SimpliVity is fighting on two fronts.

The company is competing not only with other fast-growing startups such as Nutanix Inc. but also established with names like VMware Inc. – which happens to be a key partner – that have size and brand awareness on their side. But it nonetheless managed to increase sales more than 500 percent last year, momentum that the new funding is meant to sustain into 2015.

SimpliVity intends to spend the capital on growing operations, with plans to reach a headcount of 800 by the end of the year. The investment, which also saw the participation of existing backers Accel Partners, Charles River Ventures, DFJ Growth, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Meritech Capital Partners, brings its total raised to $276 million at a valuation of over $1 billion.