Kaminario, the Needham, Mass. all-flash array maker, announced today that the company had raised $75 million in a funding round led by private equity firm Waterwood. Other backers include Globespan Capital Partners, Lazarus, Pitango, Sequoia and Silicon Valley Bank. To date, the Kaminario has attracted $218 million in investments.

The injection of new capital will help fuel the expansion of the company’s channel partner program into the Asia-Pacific and Middle East regions, in addition to Eastern and Western Europe. The funds are also earmarked for new technology partnerships, with an eye toward integration with database, virtualization and developer solutions.

Naturally, some of the money will be used to further advance its all-flash storage architecture.

Dani Golan, founder and CEO of Kaminario, wrote that his company would “continue to strengthen our platform and accelerate innovation,” in a Jan. 10 blog post. “Kaminario K2 was built from the ground-up for flash, with the agility, scalability, cost efficiency and performance to support today’s everything-as-a-service world.”

Josh Epstein, vice president of Global Marketing at Kaminario, told InfoStor the company’s “software-defined architecture can take maximum advantage of commodity hardware advances – always positioned to rapidly incorporate denser, faster, less expensive hardware including flash media, processor and networking technologies.” As such, Kaminario is pursuing opportunities to bring those innovations to mainstream data centers.

“There are some exciting hardware advances that are getting closer to enterprise-readiness including NVMe for ultra-low latency connections to solid state drives and NVMeF for low latency networking with storage arrays,” continued Epstein. “Another example of hardware advancements is the availability of 3D Xpoint drives. While 3D Xpoint will not be cost effective for enterprise storage for some time, it is another example of the evolving hardware technologies that continually reshape the industry.”

Citing a forecast from IDC, Kaminario noted that all-flash storage is the fastest-growing category in an enterprise storage systems market valued at $40 billion. The research firm expects the market for all flash arrays to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.4 percent through 2020.

Currently, flash-enabled storage systems (all-flash and hybrid) represent a bright spot in a declining enterprise storage market.

Vendors moved $8.8 billion worth storage gear to businesses in the third quarter (Q3) of 2016, a 3.2 percent year-over-year decline, according to a report published last month from IDC. Producers of traditional, hard-disk based arrays were hard hit, suffering a 33.6 percent drop in sales.

In contrast, sales all-flash arrays skyrocketed to the tune of $1.1 billion in worldwide revenues, a 61 percent increase. The hybrid flash segment also posted healthy sales of $2.1 billion.