StorSimple, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company that is trying to carve out a niche in the ultra-hot cloud storage market has raised $13 million in new funding in a round led by Mayfield Fund. Ignition Partners is also a new investor in the company, and joins previous investors, Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

StorSimple has raised a total of $21 million in funding so far. StorSimple is building a cloud-ready hybrid storage appliance that is focusing on Microsoft (s msft) applications including Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange 2010, File Services, and Virtual Machine environments. It is one of the many startups that are trying to improve storage utilization inside the enterprise infrastructure. In addition, the company is going to be duking it out with the likes of EMC (s EMC), which too has grand designs on the cloud-storage market.

The company was co-founded by CEO Ursheet Parikh (formerly with Cisco) and president & VP of Engineering, Guru Pangal (formerly with Brocade). It raised $8 million in Series A funding in June 2009 from Satish Dharamraj (Redpoint, Zimbra) and Bernard Dalle of Index Ventures. Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista Networks and Mike Volpi of Index Ventures, both formerly of Cisco are also on StorSimple’s board of directors. In addition to new funding, the company also named Ian Howells, a software and storage industry veteran as its chief marketing officer. He joins the company after stints at Alfresco and SeeBeyond.

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