The need for CIOs to support fast-growing data volumes with budgets that aren’t growing nearly as fast has spurred a renewed focus on efficiency among analytics vendors, some of which are going as low as the chip level in search of ways to help customers squeeze more out of their hardware. But that effort largely overlooks a key factor that Robin Systems Inc. now hopes to address with the help of $22 million in fresh funding.

The capital will fuel the development of its analytics orchestration software, which promises to optimize the resource utilization of data crunching clusters based on the physical characteristics of the underlying infrastructure. It’s made up of over half a dozen patent-pending technologies that the startup developed internally over the past two years.

The magic starts with a monitoring module that tracks operational parameters like the location of the nodes in an analytics environment to map out the flow of data through the cluster, which can be running Spark, Hadoop or any other of the popular data processing frameworks that Robin Systems supports. That information is sent to a scheduler that warms up the server containing the batch that is due next for analysis to avoid any delay in ingestion.

The task involves moving the data into memory and allocating the necessary bandwidth for the operation, which in turn is handled using another specialized component that taps the monitoring module to find opportunities to improve utilization and redirects traffic accordingly. Exactly how and where that optimization performed is up to the administrator.

That means Robin Systems’ platform can be configured to, say, prioritize ad hoc queries over less urgent historical analyses when allocating bandwidth. The customization is performed through an abstraction layer that the startup’s patent filings indicate also extends that control to storage, allowing administrators to specify the type of media on which a certain dataset should be kept.

Robin Systems claims that the combined efficiency improvements from its capabilities can enable organizations to analyze their data up to three times faster for a third of the cost, a value proposition that the new $22 million in funding will help expand. The bulk of the capital came from Fortune 500 financial giant USAA and DN Capital, with the remainder split among Hasso Plattner Ventures and existing backers.

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