Things are looking up for software-defined storage startup Excelero Inc., which today received a strategic investment from data center giant Western Digital Corp. that brings its total funding to $35 million.

The companies didn’t say exactly how much Western Digital is investing, but its previous total funding amounted to $30 million, so its safe to assume the data center hardware maker has added about $5 million to Excelero’s kitty.

Excelero is based in Israel and was founded in 2014 before coming out of stealth mode three years later. The company sells storage software based on NVMesh technology and likes to use the term “software-defined block storage” to describe it.

The software is designed to leverage “server storage area networks,” which are devices built on commodity hardware that use internal storage to bring data as close as possible to the processor. The idea is to provide scale-out applications – which grow and shrink linearly with demand – with flexible access to flash storage over networks.

The problem with server SANs is that they’re limited in their ability to share storage resources across networks. Excelero’s software fixes that by permitting applications to tap into server SAN resources, as if they were a single, giant pool of storage space.

Western Digital seems to think Excelero’s software will be a good fit for its NVMe solid-state hardware, and it’s now working with the company to make them compatible. Both would pair nicely with Western Digital’s new OpenFlex architecture released last week, which is designed to give data center operators the ability to scale compute, storage and network resources independently using software-composable infrastructure.

“Our new OpenFlex architecture and products allow for the independent scaling of compute, storage and network resources, with orchestration and management enabled through an open API,” Western Digital Capital President Mark Long said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Excelero to integrate and advance our technologies to create even more powerful solutions for customers in data-centric businesses.”

So it’s likely Excelero will add support for Western Digital’s OpenFlex and associated hardware and application programming interfaces soon. In the meantime, Excelero said it plans to use the new funding to accelerate its sales activities worldwide.

Image: Excelero