Just five months after it laid off about 14 percent of its workforce, Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Xiotech hopes to accelerate its storage networking business out of the recession with a new round of $10 million in financing that it says will help it build out new product offerings for release in early 2010.

A specialist in self-managing storage systems, Xiotech’s last beat the bushes for $40 million in financing just under two years ago following its purchase of Seagate Technology’s Advanced Storage Architecture (ASA) Group. It leveraged that acquisition and round of financing to develop its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) self-healing storage technology and its Emprise line of SAN products, released in mid-2008.

The company reports that it will use this latest cash infusion, plus an additional $10 million line of credit to develop technology complementary to ISE. The idea is to continue to build on the company’s vision for storage architectures that allow enterprises to increase storage capacity and management functionality in an open infrastructure that doesn’t require a commitment to a single closed storage system.

“We believe the positive reception the marketplace has given the Emprise product line indicates that customers recognize storage systems should be able to largely manage themselves, and should be expandable in increments,” said Casey Powell, president and CEO of Xiotech, in a statement. “They should not require expensive and disruptive 'forklift upgrades.' That's why we're going to continue to advocate for our storage vision, and this additional funding will help us realize these goals."

Like many in the storage world, Xiotech lately has been catering to the increased storage needs of businesses as they build out their virtualized IT infrastructure. At VMworld this month, Xiotech rolled out VM Storage Solution Lite, a entry-level version of its virtualized storage management system designed to put the power to provision and manage SAN resources into the hands of smaller organizations.