Flash memory companies continue to rake in the investment funds. Among them is Violin Memory, which today announced that it had raised $35 million in Series B funding led by Toshiba and Juniper Networks.

Toshiba, like Samsung, has been seeding the market for its own flash memory chips by investing in startups that are dependent on the low-power, solid-state storage tech. Toshiba America’s Vice President of the Memory Business Unit, Scott Nelson stated in a release, “We are pleased to expand our relationship with Violin and help accelerate the penetration of flash Memory Arrays in the performance-driven enterprise data centers.” No doubt.

Violin Memory makes a caching appliances that provide an app performance boost for businesses that want to fetch data that resides on disk-based NFS storage systems.  Depending on the size of the Violin array and the total percentage of data offloaded onto its hardware, applications can see up to a 30X improvement in IOPS and latency, according to the company. Its technology can be found in the data centers of companies like AOL, Microsoft and HP.

Today’s funding news keeps alive the flash funding momentum that went into high gear a little over a year ago as data center operators turned their attention to energy efficiency. In late 2009, funding rounds, some spearheaded by big names in flash memory production like Samsung, poured millions into startups working on flash and SSD-based storage systems for data centers. Fusion-io, a maker of flash storage cards for servers, stands as a notable example of a firm that’s been riding that wave to broader market opportunities.

With this round of funding, it looks like Violin is charting the same course.

Image credit: Violin Memory