Start-up Akorri Monday announced it had garnered $15 million in venture capital funding to further develop its technology designed to maximize application performance by optimizing server and storage resource utilization in virtual environments.

Akorri, founded in January 2005, develops software that can perform cross-domain management for applications. The company says its BalancePoint product is able to assess storage and server resources and predict how changes in use, capacity or resources, will affect application performance. Company officials say the technology analyzes dependencies among applications and storage and server resources, correlates the data and then is able to predict how applications will perform under different circumstances.

The start-up competes with industry heavyweights such as EMC, HP and HP as well as storage management vendors such as Onaro. Akorri executives say the company's technology differentiates itself from competition with its analytics capabilities that provide a broad view of data centers components and their dependencies.

"To manage the data center today, you have to have a holistic view of it, not just what's going on with storage, what's going on with servers. You have to bring them together. IT really has no idea how the relationships between servers, storage, networks and applications are affecting one another," said Richard Corley, Akorri's founder and CTO.

Akorri landed $8.5 million of Series A funding in February 2005 from investors Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and BlueStream Ventures. The company brought in another $15 million in a second round in April 2006 from previous investors Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. And Monday Akorri announced Matrix and North Bridge led the Series C round of $15 million alongside Globespan Capital Partners and BlueStream Ventures.

The company said in a press release it plans to expand product development, professional services, sales and marketing among other things with this round of funding.