Primary Data Inc. has just picked up $40 million in funding to fuel its growth in data management.

The company said $20 million came via a Series C funding round, while the other half came thanks to a new line of credit. The round was led by Pelion Venture Partners, with participation from Accel, Battery Ventures and strategic investors from previous rounds. The new funds will be used to accelerate the company’s sales acceleration and add new staff to its sales teams.

In addition to the funding, Primary Data also announced the release of DataSphere v2.0, its main software platform that enables intelligent and automated data management.

“The days of manual data management are coming to an end, and this investment round indicates the growth our investors also see on the horizon,” said Primary Data Chief Executive Officer Lance Smith. “As data volumes scale out and up into the cloud, enterprises are looking for a way to intelligently manage and automate how data is managed across different storage systems.”

Primary Data clearly hopes that enterprises will decide its “way” is the way forward. Its DataSphere platform uses machine learning technologies to manage customer’s data, collecting metadata on how they access said data and how it performs with regard to the IOPS, bandwidth, latency and availability of the storage medium. DataSphere then then applies “Intelligent Analytics” to all of this data so it can match customers’ requirements for things such as performance, cost and reliability. It also helps customers make decisions in real-time and move data to different locations without any application disruption, the company says.

The main advantage of this automated data management is that enterprises can get the most out of their existing information technology infrastructure. In addition, it allows them to integrate their infrastructure with the cloud and get better performance there too. The platform is said to be compatible with Amazon Web Services, Cloudian, Google, Scality, NetApp and VMware clouds.

DataSphere 2.0 also makes it easier to move data at the file level between public and private clouds and on-premises servers, while the update user interface makes it easier for IT administrators to see and control their data across their entire storage ecosystem.

“When technology is complex, it often means we need to figure out a better solution to the problem,” said Steve Wozniak, the cofounder of Apple Inc. who joined Primary Data as its chief scientist in 2014. “DataSphere 2.0 makes it simple for enterprises to finally automate how data is managed by using the intelligence that has been sitting right there in your metadata all along.”

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