There is no shortage of platforms promising to help organizations address the rapid growth in data volumes more efficiently, but Hedvig Inc. believes that it has a better idea. The startup roared out of stealth this week to try to carve out its own slice of the software-defined storage action.

The launch culminates three years of secretive work led by founder Avinash Lakshman (right), who is perhaps best known for his contributions to the Dynamo paper that inspired many of the most popular non-relational databases in existence today. He is also credited with helping to create Cassandra, one of the leading free implementations, experience that Hedvig is now attempting to apply one layer down the stack.

The startup’s new platform offers to aggregate commodity hardware and off-premise cloud resources into a reliable storage environment with advanced management capabilities historically only available in expensive proprietary appliances. It’s the same value proposition as practically every other software-defined solution out there, but with a few major deviations.

Hedvig provides the ability to create logical partitions customized to meet the requirements of different workloads. The administrator can allocate a specific amount and type of storage capacity to each volume, set distinct operational parameters and specify the format in which the information kept inside is exposed to virtual machines.

Those instances in turn access the data through a proxy implemented separately from the part that handles the partitions, a feature that allows the two components to scale independently. That’s invaluable for running unpredictable workloads such as Hadoop that require varying ratios of storage capacity and processing power.

But this is not to say Hedvig is limiting its prospects. The platform also provides an option of growing an entire deployment on the same curve to accommodate traditional applications with more straightforward needs. The startup is competing over those workloads with Foundation Data Inc., another new player founded by veterans of the data management world that hit the scene only a few months earlier.

Hedvig is rapidly making up for the lost time, having already landed a number of major customers including accounting giant Intuit Inc. and Paul Hastings LLP. The startup has raised $12.5 million in funding from True Ventures and Atlantic Bridge Capital against the backdrop of its public debut to help attract more buyers amid the intensifying competition over storage spending.