After having closed its second funding round in January, data warehousing startup Aster Data Systems has added another $5 million to its closed round, with the add-up investment coming from new investor Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). With the additional funds, Aster's total funds have touched $27 million.

Aster CEO Mayank Bawa said that the company felt the extra capital raised from the IVP contribution, after the closure of the second round, could work as a good "cushion" - especially with the economic crisis deepening. 

Aster, which is based in Redwood City, California, operates in the sphere of storing data for the purpose of business analysis, for some top-notch customers, like MySpace.

The company banks heavily on its nCluster system, which is advantageous in the sense that it runs on low-priced servers, and uses the MapReduce programming structure made popular by Google. Not only does the framework make provisions for more detailed queries, it also does not have any downtime.

In the opinion of IVP General Partner Steve Harrick, who led the investment, Aster's low cost has enhanced its value many times more amid the ongoing economic crisis. Saying that Aster intends taking a more advanced look at data warehousing than its competitors - like DATAllegro and Teradata - Harrick added that Aster's nCluster system and its overall approach is "fundamentally different."