Maxta, the Server San software startup that lets servers multitask for storage, has raised $25 million in its second round of funding in six months.

The series-B funding round was led by Intel and Tenaya Capital, and comes at a time when the software-defined and coverged storage trends are just about to take off. Previously, Maxta raised some $10 million from a series-A funding round back in October 2013.

What with competitor converged compute/storage firms like Simplivity and Nutanix all progressing well, and with VMware’s recent launch of VSAN and EMC advancing its ScaleIO tech, it’s clear that Maxta’s investors have seen fit to put the pedal to the metal. This fresh round of cash, which existing investor Andreessen Horowitz also contributed too, will be used for “product development and to expand its marketing, sales and support efforts,” Maxta said in a statement.

Maxta’s main product offering is its Maxta Storage Platform (MxSP), which transforms regular x86 servers into converged compute/storage boxes. This allows ITs to aggregate storage across multiple virtualized servers. Maxta says its tech is “hypervisor-agnostic”, although VMware is its main focus. The company also says MxSP is “resilient”, doing away with the need for traditional storage arrays.

“Maxta will use this opportunity to tap into Intel’s significant engineering and marketing resources to provide superior VM-centric storage solutions,” said Yoram Novick, President and CEO of Maxta, in a canned press release.

Why, why, why???

The question now is why Intel’s sudden interest in Maxta? The likely answer is that Maxta might want to tweak its code to make better use of X86 hardware, with Intel’s close cooperation. If so, the investment is a way for Maxta and Intel to accelerate the converged and software-defined trends, and one that supports Intel’s strategy of innovation.

But how will it support Intel’s strategy? According to Maxta, it plans to “work with Intel on business development, marketing, and go-to-market opportunities as well as to optimise MxSP technology to deliver superior converged, software-defined storage for Intel-based platforms.”

It could be that Maxta was thinking to optimize MxSP for other platforms too, including IBM POWER and ARM, and that’s something Intel would definitely want to prevent – it has no interest in seeing other CPU architectures make progress in the storage array or server side of data centers. After all, if more software-defined products are geared towards Intel hardware, it’s less likely that virtualized data center server buyers will be interested in IBM POWER or ARM. In other words, Intel’s move could be a partly defensive one.

The same goes for the likes of Simplivity and Nutanix and their Intel-loving Server SAN software. Intel will be quite aware of the risk that these could go dancing off with ARM or POWER, and will be keen to try and stop that happening.

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