Qumulo, a Seattle-based enterprise data storage startup, today announced that it had raised $24 million in Series A funding. Highland Capital Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Valhalla Partners participated in the round.

The company, founded in March by ex-Isilon executives, will use the funds to flesh out its engineering and leadership teams in Seattle and ramp up product development. So far, Qumulo is keeping mum on the products and technologies that the company is building, but indications are that Big Data storage management will feature prominently in the startup’s future.

Qumulo says that end users are doubling the amount of data that they store every two years, a rate of data growth that’s causing headaches for storage administrators. Compounding the problem are virtualized workloads that strain traditional IT architectures. According to the company, “Qumulo is solving the manageability, scalability and efficiency problems that plague the $35 billion enterprise data storage market.”

Charles Curran, a general partner at Valhalla Partners, hints that flash storage may also play a role. “Qumulo’s team of enterprise storage experts is positioned to solve the problems introduced by the confluence of three huge trends in enterprise IT — consumerization, SSD technology, and commoditization,” he said in a statement.

In its quest to tame Big Data, Qumulo has attracted executives with a legacy of architecting scale-out storage solutions.

Heading the company as CEO is Peter Godman, the former head of software engineering at Isilon. He is joined by other ex-Isilon staffers including former chief architect Aaron Passey, who now occupies the CTO spot, and a former distinguished engineer, Neal Fachan, who now serves as vice president of Engineering.

EMC snapped up Isilon in late 2010, acquiring its cluster-aware OneFS NAS operating system in the process. Earlier this month EMC launched OneFS 7.0 (codenamed “Mavericks”). The updated software offers an array of enhancements and optimizations, including a 25 percent boost in single file system throughput and new caching features that reduce latency.

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