History repeats itself rather often in the world of enterprise storage. Every few years, there appears a wave of startups heralding some exciting new trend that poses a threat to the old guard, and each time, the frontrunners find themselves acquired by the incumbent vendors they were planning to disrupt. The cycle has preserved the industry’s balance of power for decades, but as the pace of change accelerates, that seems to be changing.

For the first time in a long time, the market is seeing the emergence of not one but two paradigm-shifting technologies in the same period: flash memory and hybrid cloud storage. The usual culprits have already made a number of highly publicised purchases to get in on the action, but many of the new vendors driving the transition are still clinging onto their independence, at least for the time being. Falling into that camp is Nasuni Inc., an up-and-coming provider of cloud-enabled arrays that raised $10 million in funding this week to take on the big leagues.

Founded in 2009, the Massachusetts-based startup has developed a patented file system called UniFS that provides a common management layer across both on- and off-premise deployments.  What sets Nusani apart is not the functionality itself, which is similar to many other products on the market, but how it’s implemented:  the firm ships the software together with all the other components necessary to put together a centralized hybrid cloud storage environments, including arrays and a managed service in addition to value-added services such as backup and archiving.

The ability to purchase the entire package from a single source eliminates the need for customers to deal with multiple vendors, thereby sparing CIOs a great deal of paperwork and avoiding a fragmented support structure wherein it’s left to the do IT organization to connect the dots on technical issues. By doing away with all that complexity, Nasuni has effectively removed one of the biggest barriers to hybrid cloud adoption, a feat that earned it high-profile customers such as Logitech International S.A., EMI Music Publishing Ltd. and Ameresco Inc. The firm claims to have seen bookings more than double in the last quarter from the same period in 2013.

That momentum may not last for long, however, now that Nasuni isn’t the only one pitching a unified hybrid cloud storage bundle anymore. Microsoft Corp. offers similar capabilities with its recently introduced Azure StorSimple arrays, and enterprise storage stalwart EMC Corp. picked up TwinStrata Inc. last month with the goal of delivering the same integrated value proposition down the line.

Nonetheless, the company is confident that it can continue its growth streak, and it managed to sway some of Silicon Valley’s top investors to its side. The newly announced round saw the participation of returning backers Flybridge Capital Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners along with an unnamed strategic investor, bringing Nasuni’s total funding to an impressive $53 million. The firm said that the fresh capital will be used to scale product development, sales and marketing operations.

Image via Nasuni