The storage industry gained a new representative in the billion-dollar-plus valuation club this week after Infinidat Inc. raised $150 million from investors to help drive the adoption of its groundbreaking hybrid array. The system is the culmination of more than five years of work that started with founder Moshe Yanai (right) setting out to one-up his earlier contributions to data management in the enterprise.

The veteran executive first made a name for himself with the invention of Symmetrix, the technology credited with catapulting EMC from the rapidly shrinking pond that was the minicomputer industry in the 1980s to the top of the storage food chain. Yanai went on to strike out on his own and establish a startup called XIV Inc. that was eventually acquired by IBM in 2008 for $350 million.

Infinidat is described as a something of a spiritual successor to that venture but with an eye towards the stock exchange instead of a quick exit, a goal that the executive and his colleagues have been working aggressively to realize. The roughly 200-strong team produced north of 100 patents since forming in 2009, an impressive accomplishment even by the standards of the fast-moving startup world.

Those inventions form the building blocks of the InfiniBox, a platform that lives up to its name by packing a massive two petabytes of usable capacity inside a standard rack and providing the ability to scale to many times that across multiple shelves all while maintaining seven nines of availability. That translates into about three seconds of downtime per year, an exceptional level of reliability credited to a unique concoction of algorithms that evenly distribute data across the 480 commodity disks in the system to minimize the impact of individual failures.

When one of the six-terabyte drives stops working properly, the software simply redistributes the load to the rest of the array using a recovery technique touted as the fastest of its kind in the industry. Layered over the top of that logic is an access layer that can expose data in the format most convenient for an application, whether it’s native blocks, files or objectives, which covers the full gamut of workloads in the typical data center.

Rounding off the InfiniBox is a speedy flash cache of up to 38 terabytes makes it possible to have the most important portion of that information readily available for fast retrieval. Administrators can control exactly what’s stored where and how through a built-in management console that comes integrated VMware.’s ubiquitous virtualization platform as well as OpenStack, which signals that the startup is targeting not only traditional enterprises but providers as well.

Several Fortune 500 companies have already bought the system, although Infinidat is not specifying exactly how many or who. But it has apparently been seeing enough momentum to catch the attention of global private equity powerhouse TPG, which led the new $150 million round. The investment bumpsthe startup’s valuation past the $1.2 billion mark and should provide ample fuel for its journey towards a public offering, bringing the total capital raised for the mission so far to a formidable $230 million.