Symform, a novel Seattle cloud storage start-up begun 18 months or so ago by a couple of ex-Microsoft guys, has gotten a $4 million second round to go with its $1.5 million first round.

Longworth Venture Partners led the new round, with OVP, the company's initial backer, kicking in. Longworth gets a board seat.

Symform has abandoned utility pricing and instead offers "all you can store" for a flat monthly fee. Its Cooperative Storage Cloud, which debuted last October, is a SETI-style scheme to aggregate the excess storage capacity in millions of small business servers - the property of the company's own customers - and transform this otherwise dicey widgetry into a secure and reliable global storage system complements of some Symform software.

This is the way it works. Customers contribute space equal to the amount they consume in the storage cloud. Symform handles the cloud's day-to-day management of network security and administration. The data is encrypted on the customer's computer using 256-bit AES algorithms and divided into redundant fragments using industry-standard Reed-Solomon encoding for high availability (Symform calls its proprietary version RAID-96). Files are automatically mirrored into the storage cloud and the fragmented data is randomly distributed to multiple destination nodes on the network so no single node holds all the data. The company says the data can be retrieved and/or restored at any time and is sent and retrieved in parallel to maximize the speed of the backup and restore.

It's supposed to give the small businesses Symform is targeting a backup and disaster recovery solution that's more secure, 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper than traditional online backup services like a Mozy or Symantec that are shouldering high data center costs.

The start-up is supposed to have a thousand resellers worldwide and they set the price. It expects to double its growth this year.