Three-year-old Datera is announcing $40 million in funding on Tuesday and is formally rolling out its Elastic Data Fabric, a data center storage product.

It's already being used in production by some large enterprises, including the Dutch IT company Schuberg Philis, the bare-metal server company Packet, and the electronic design company Cadence.

Today’s funding announcement is the Mountain View, Calif. startup’s second round, with total funds raised to date from Khosla Ventures, Samsung Ventures — and Andy Bechtolsheim (chairman of Arista) and Pradeep Sindhu (CTO of Juniper).

Datera’s block storage for large-scale clouds is comparable to the storage developed by webscale companies such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, says Marc Fleischmann, co-founder and CEO of Datera.

He says better storage is needed to cope with the demands of applications that are spun up and scaled all the time in a dynamic environment. “You can’t just come in with traditional storage and set it up once and leave it running," says Fleischmann. “It has to be rearranged at scale all the time.

“Block is the typical way to solve high-performance storage in the cloud. It’s a hard problem to solve to make [devices] look like local devices for every computer in the data center, when there could be a massive amount of flash, or mixed storage devices… a sophisticated array of systems at the backend.”

Datera’s data center fabric uses the iSCSI protocol, which is Ethernet-based, as opposed to Fibre Channel over IP.

According to SDxCentral’s Converged Data Center report, there are different schools of thought on data center fabric protocols, but Fleischmann says, “We are not supporting Fibre Channel. The problem is, if you use it, you end up with two networks: Fibre Channel for storage and Ethernet for apps.”

Fleischmann says Datera competes with the likes of SolidFire, which got acquired by NetApp for $870 million, and Red Hat’s Ceph.