Data center networking company Big Switch Networks raised $30.7 million in additional funds to increase sales, expand products, and invest in R&D.

The funding included participation from existing investors Dell Technologies Capital, Silverlake Waterman, Index Ventures, MSD Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Intel Capital. The company also touts a strategic investment from an unnamed “Tier-1 service provider.” This announcement brings the company’s total funding to over $120 million.

Big Switch has two products: its Big Monitoring Fabric and its Big Cloud Fabric. Its Big Monitoring Fabric is a network packet broker that enables users to add security and monitor data centers and cloud traffic. The Big Cloud switching fabric allows for a choice of switching hardware for OpenStack, VMware, and container environments.

For the next year, the company will maintain focus on sales in the U.S. However, outside of the U.S. "We're building out our team across the [APAC] region as we now have dozens of customers in Korea, China, and Singapore, so those are areas where we are gaining marketshare," wrote Big Switch CEO Douglas Murray in an email to SDxCentral. The company expects to double its global headcount by the end of the year to support these efforts, he said. After the next round of hires, he said the company will have 175 employees globally.

The release of Big Cloud Fabric 4.0 moved the company deeper into container orchestration and networking, supporting Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS, and Red Hat OpenShift orchestration platforms. Specifically, the fabric allows an operator to see which physical switches and ports are involved in the networking of containers. The latest release also introduced an orchestration agent, which provides the networking for containers as they are being created, and kills the virtual connections when the containers disappear.

Containers are a great example of an area worth investing in from an R&D perspective, said Murray. The company touts an automotive manufacturing customer focused on autonomous driving software having a large deployment with its container orchestration platform.