Serial entrepreneur Mohit Aron is marking another milestone along his long career this morning following his newest startup’s launch from stealth to change how organizations manage the passive data taking up much of their storage capacity. Its plan for accomplishing that borrows a page straight from the book of the founder’s previous venture.

Nutanix Inc., which Aron established in 2009 with former colleagues from Aster Data, helped pioneer the hyperconverged approach of combining servers and storage into integrated modules with built-in management functionality. Cohesity Inc. is now putting forth a similar proposition for the backups, archives and other secondary files that provide the logical scaffolding for the small subset end-users access on a regular basis.

“Cohesity is looking to bring the value proposition of hyperconverged infrastructure to the secondary storage market,” says Wikibon senior analyst Stu Miniman. “Through the use of infinite clones and snapshots, Cohesity’s fully distributed file system delivers a cost effective way to  manage and protect the massive amounts of data overrunning IT.”

The startup promises to consolidate that information into a homegrown appliance that combines 96 terabytes of disk capacity with a speedy 6-terabyte flash cache to speed up access into a 2U chassis, the same size as Nutanix’s systems. And also like its hyperconverged cousins, the box draws most of its strength not from the hardware but rather the software running on top.

The biggest problem with the fragmentation of secondary storage in the traditional enterprise lies in the fact that each of the different systems supporting the environment has its own specialized management stack. That makes it all but impossible for administrators to effectively track what’s stored where and how, which results in data continuing to take up capacity after it’s no longer needed.

Keeping everything on the same platform  does away with that problem. Cohesity promises to unify an organization’s passive data under a centralized interface that allows for fairly straightforward identification of redundant files thanks to built-in analytics functionality. That consolidation also has the added benefit of simplifying adoption, enabling enterprises to start out using the appliance as just another backup target and expand to more use cases from there.

But Cohesity isn’t the only startup with that value proposition. Rubrik Inc., the brainchild of a former Nutanix board member, debuted a rivaling appliance only last month promising to deliver many of the same benefits. The two systems even share the ability to extend the on-board storage with capacity from the public cloud. And that’s not to mention Delphix Inc., which has offered the same functionality in software-only form for several years now.

Yet the startup’s investors are apparently nonetheless confident enough in its ability to differentiate to have put another $55 million of their money on it last month. The biggest chunk of the funding came from  ARTIS Ventures and Qualcomm’s investment arm, which co-led the round.  Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, Google Ventures and a number of others also contributed, bringing Cohesity’s total raised to a healthy $70 million.

Photo via Cohesity