RainStor, the British infrastructure software company born Clearpace before it moved to the US late last year, has gotten itself a $7.5 million B round from Informatica and Storm Ventures to go along with its new headquarters.

It's also got what it thinks is a game-changing update of its "Big Data" mojo, stuff it reckons is a new class of data repository providing cost-efficient historical data retention and on-demand retrieval for massive amounts of structured data in the cloud as well as on-site.

It claims modern data warehouses aren't built for online queries and long-term retention of large data volumes that must remain immutable - in some places for more than a decade for ongoing analysis and fraud detection - because they can't compress the data enough or suck it up fast enough. It claims it can and in the process reduce the cost of owning massive quantities of historical data by an order of magnitude compared to traditional databases.

Its rev, RainStor 4, is supposed to offer greater control over the data in the repository for those beset by stringent compliance regulations and persnickety data governance policies that can cost a pretty penny if shirked.

The company is sure it's time has come because data sure ain't getting any smaller. And as it balloons it raises issues of hardware costs, scalability and access.

The RainStor solution is supposed to meet the challenge with very little bandwidth, storage, administrative and computing resources. It claims extreme data reduction, simplified data management and near-perfect scalability on commodity hardware.

It also claims it can find a needle in a haystack.

Users can run queries against stored information using SQL query or a range of packaged BI and reporting solutions. The company says the new widgetry improves ingestion and query performance as dictated by specific industry use cases by up to 50%. That means it vacuums up very large data sets way faster than a traditional database using comparable hardware.

RainStor says when and how data should be deleted once compliance periods have ended is also critical. The rev includes record level expiry, legal hold by record, automatic deletion of records based on business rules and the ability to group and tag records for efficient future discovery.

Currently the company has close to 100 deployments worldwide through third parties like EMC and Informatica that OEM and embed its software into their applications. Ten percent of them are on the cloud.

RainStor 4's new capabilities were derived from feedback from these accounts across multiple industries like policy compliance regs such as legal hold for telecom providers, HIPPA and Electronic Healthcare Record for healthcare and SOX for financial services.

RainStor solutions include application and database archiving, application retirement, SaaS Data Escrow and data warehouse archiving. It supports a wide range of hardware and OS platforms and with v4.0 has added IBM AIX and Windows.