Belgian object storage startup Amplidata has nabbed another $11 million in funding to expand sales and marketing operations and accelerate the development of its flagship AmpliStor solution. Like many of the newer products on the market, the appliance is built from commodity hardware and delivers differentiation up in the software layer, in this case with a fully abstracted management stack that includes data protection and monitoring capabilities.

The round, the company’s sixth since hitting the scene 2008, was led by Intel’s venture capital arm and included investments from all other existing backers, namely Endeavor Vision, Hummingbird Ventures and disk storage maker Quantum. The vendor resells AmpliStor to cloud service providers, government agencies and other large organizations with the kind of petabyte-scale workloads that the platform is built to run.

“Traditional RAID-based systems are no longer viable in today’s petabyte and beyond scale. Customers have recognized AmpliStor’s ability to be dynamically scaled and reconfigured across multiple sites while providing leadership performance, data durability and operating efficiency,” boasted Mike Wall, the chairman and CEO of Amplidata, in a statement.

AmpliStor is modular, enabling the degree of scalability necessary for Big Data deployments, and virtualizes common system-level administration tasks to allow for high-level management that helps avoid stretching IT operations teams too thin. Also included in the package is a patented erasure coding technology called BitSpread that splits up objects into small chunks and stores them across multiple nodes in order to increase data availability. The company claims that the software delivers a whopping 15 nines of reliability and can withstand 19 simultaneous hardware failures with no information loss, which makes it viable (at least on paper) for even the most demanding mission-critical applications.

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