"Alluxio 2.7 further strengthens Alluxio's position as a key component for AI, machine learning and deep learning in the cloud," Li said.

Alluxio has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding, capital the company will use to fuel the growth of its global operations and continue building out the capabilities of its data orchestration software for managing large-scale distributed data workloads. With the additional capital Alluxio will "enlarge our bandwidth in research and development to expand product capabilities, as well as increase our go-to-market capacity in different regions," said founder and CEO Haoyuan Li in an interview with CRN. The company is particularly looking to expand its Asia-Pacific presence and just opened an office in Beijing, China. Alluxio also announced the availability of version 2.7 of its Data Orchestration Platform with improved I/O performance for machine learning and support for open table formats such as Apachi Hudi and Iceberg. Alluxio's software, a virtual distributed file system that separates compute from storage, provides a way to unify access to data scattered across widely distributed hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud environments, making all data appear local no matter where it's stored.