Hortonworks, provider of one of the most popular commercial distributions for the open source framework for using clustered servers to crunch numbers for big data applications Apache Hadoop, has raised US$50m in a funding round joined by new and existing investors, including Yahoo!

The company plans to use the new funds to scale global field operations and invest more in its engineering organization, Rob Bearden, the company's CEO, wrote in a blog post. “It will enable us to increase the rate of innovation across all of the Hadoop projects,” he wrote.

In addition to Yahoo!, existing investors that joined the round included Silicon Valley venture capital firm Benchmark Capital and Geneva-based Index Ventures. New VCs on board include Tenaya Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group.

At the moment, Hortonworks is focused on the upcoming launch of Hadoop Yarn, which separates resource management and processing components in Hadoop 2.0. “The innovation in Yarn will further cement Hadoop as a core component of the data architectures of corporate IT organizations as it unlocks the power of Hadoop to an even broader range of new analytic, transactional, and operational use cases,” Bearden wrote.

The company announced availability of a preview version of Hortonworks Data Platform 2.0, the first Hadoop distribution to include Yarn, on Wednesday.

Hortonworks currently has more than 100 customers and its partner ecosysem includes companies like Microsoft, Teradata and Microsoft. The company works with these partners to offer analytics solutions to customers together.

The company announced the latest partneship deal on Wednesday. Storage vendor NetApp has signed up as a reseller of the data platform.

The two companies have been collaborating to integrate the Hadoop distribution with NetApp's E-Series storage arrays.