Starboard closed the round today, three months after re-launching with a new name and re-architected multiprotocol storage system, the AC72. Its lone venture capitalist investor at the time was Reldata investor Grazia Equity of Germany. Starboard’s latest round is led by another German VC, JP Ventures GmbH, with participation from Grazia.

Starboard chief marketing officer Karl Chen said Starboard will use the funding to expand its sales, marketing and customer support. Chen said Starboard has about 40 employees now at its Broomfield, Colo., and Parsippany, N.J., offices and he expects that number to increase significantly over the next three months.

Starboard claims more than 40 customers and more than 1.5 PB of capacity sold for its AC72 systems. Chen said the vendor competes mostly with NetApp FAS2000 and FAS3000 and EMC VNX 5000 unified storage systems.

The AC72 supports Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NAS storage but merely having multiprotocol support isn’t enough these days because the market is flooded with unified storage systems. Starboard will only win if it can live up to its promise to deliver greater storage efficiency and performance at substantially less cost.

Each AC72 system includes three solid-state drives (SSDs) for an acceleration tier. The system automatically writes large sequential workloads to cheaper capacity SAS drives and writes random transactional workloads to 15,000 rpm SAS drives.

Chen said the Starboard’s typical customer is a small enterprise with 50 to 5,000 employees, $10 million to $1 billion in revenue and 50 to 500 virtual machines. “Our customers want to consolidate mixed workloads of unstructured, structured and virtualized data,” he said.

Starboard didn’t volunteer information about its Reldata roots, although representatives freely admitted it when asked. With its new AC72 storage system, Starboard wants to appear as a fresh, shiny company rather than one that has been around the block many times without making much of an impact on the storage world.

“It’s not a rebranding of Reldata but Starboard is not your typical startup,” said Starboard chief marketing officer Karl Chen, who joined the company after it became Starboard. “[Reldata] had great technology, so why not absorb Reldata and reduce our time to market? This way, we were able to get to market a lot faster by leveraging what Reldata had. We had the option of starting brand new or taking something that would accelerate our time to market.”

Starboard has the same CEO, CTO, engineering VP and sales chief as Reldata, and has not yet raised any new funding. Starboard’s 30 employees are a mix of Reldata holdovers and new hires. The AC72 includes Reldata intellectual property and was developed in part by Reldata engineers.

“Absolutely, there is technology that we are leveraging from Reldata to build the Starboard Storage product,” Chen said. But he points out that the Starboard product is a new architecture with a different code base. The RelData 9240i did not support Fibre Channel, it was a single controller system, and used traditional RAID blocks. There was no dynamic pooling or SSD tier. “It’s a completely different product from what (Reldata) was selling,” Chen added.

The company also moved from Parsippany, NJ to Broomfield, Colo., which has a deep workforce with storage experience. Starboard CEO Victor Walker, CTO (and Reldata founder) Kirill Malkin, VP of engineering John Potochnik and director of sales Russell Wine were all part of Reldata. They are joined by chairman Bill Chambers, the LeftHand Networks founder and CEO who sold the iSCSI SAN company to HP for $360 million in 2008.

Starboard will continue to service Reldata 9240i systems, but will not longer sell the Reldata line.

(Sonia R. Lelii contributed to this blog).