Atlantis Computing, vendor of data center storage optimization solutions, announced the completion of a US$20m financing round led by new investor Adams Street Partners.

Previous investors Cisco Systems, El Dorado Ventures and Partech International also participated in the Series D financing. The funds will be used to support the company's worldwide expansion.

The news comes the same week another storage-virtualization company, PernixData, announced it too had raised $20m for expansion.

Dave Welsh, partner at Adams Street Partners and a member of Atlantis Computing's board of directors, said the company has been looking to invest in the virtualization market for some time. “We were impressed by several aspects of Atlantis Computing's business, including its proven award-winning technology, strong go-to-market partnerships and fast-growing blue-chip customer base,” he said.

“We realized that Atlantis Computing is dramatically impacting the way storage will be consumed in the next generation virtual data center.”

Atlantis says it has more than 250 customers with more than 300,000 licenses sold.

Bernard Harguindeguy, president and CEO of Atlantis, said the company took its first venture-capital funding round in 2010, but has also funded growth through sales revenue. “Funds from this latest round will be used to accelerate our worldwide expansion as we continue delivering on our vision of highly optimized storage infrastructure in the virtualized data center,” he said.

Atlantis' solutions aim to eliminate the dependency on high-performance and close-proximity storage to enable any application to run on-demand with any storage – decoupling the application from storage just as the hypervisor decoupled the application from server hardware.

Atlantis ILIO enables both Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and virtualized XenApp to run entirely in-memory, without physical storage. Atlantis ILIO for cloud-scale deployments of virtual servers such as databases, collaboration and mail servers, is slated for release in the near future.

Earlier this year, Atlantis Computing released Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0, which enables Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View customers to deliver virtual desktops that are cheaper and faster than physical PCs right away while using their existing images, tools and processes.