VentureBeat

Data warehousing startup Aster Data Systems has added another $5 million to its second round of financing, bringing its total capital to $27 million.

The Redwood City, Calif. company stores data for business analysis purposes for some big-name customers, including MySpace. Its nCluster system has the advantage of running on cheap servers, using the MapReduce programming framework popularized by Google to allow for more detailed queries. On top of that, it doesn’t have any downtime.

Chief executive Mayank Bawa says he spoke to new investor Institutional Venture Partners while raising the second round, but found that there wasn’t room to add IVP to the recent funding. However, after closing the round, Batwa decided that raising extra cash could provide a good cushion for the downturn.

IVP General Partner Steve Harrick, who led the investment, noted that with its low cost, Aster’s value has become even more apparent during the recession. He also emphasized that Aster is taking a more advanced look at data warehousing compared to competitors like DATAllegro and Teradata.

“The core of that [competing] software was written, six, eight, 10 years ago, depending on the vendor,” Harrick says. “And it was updated, obviously, but this, according to the customers we’ve talked to and everything we’ve seen, is a fundamentally different approach.”

Since closing its second round in January, Aster hasn’t been standing still. It announced a version of nCluster that works in the cloud (specifically, Amazon Web Services), rather than on site hardware. There are some unique features to Aster’s cloud offering, like the ability to “hibernate” databases (by sticking them in cheap storage) when you don’t need them.

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Tags: co:Aster Data Systems, inv:Institutional-Venture-Partners