Mesosphere Raises $36M for Application Data Center OS

Sean Michael

Updated · Dec 08, 2014

Startup Mesosphere today announced it has raised $36 million in a Series B round of funding, to fuel its efforts in supporting and extending the open source Apache Mesos technology platform. The B round brings the total capital raised to $48.8 million.

Apache Mesos is an open source project that enables an application to harness the power of multiple distributed servers by abstracting the physical compute, memory and storage into a larger logical unit. Mesosphere is using its new funding to build out a larger vision for Mesos that will see it transformed into a full fledged data center operating system (DCOS).

Matthew Trifiro, SVP at Mesosphere, told Enterprise Apps Today that the Mesosphere DCOS will be commercially available early next year. The plan is for Mesosphere to have both enterprise (paid) and community (free) editions.

“It is built around open source tools, but has a lot of secret sauce,” Trifiro said.

How It Works

The Apache Mesos component provides a distributed systems kernel for the DCOS and is supplemented with additional services, including a new system initiation layer called Marathon. DCOS also includes a distributed service orchestration component called Chronos, which enables administrators to run Linux cron commands across the platform. For storage, the DCOS will leverage the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and the system also supports the Docker container technology.

From a deployment perspective, DCOS runs on popular Linux server operating systems including Red Hat, Ubuntu and CoreOS. The system will also be deployable across cloud services including Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, VMware vCloud Air, Google Compute Engine and Digital Ocean.

Moving Mesophere Forward

The new funding round is all about helping to push Mesosphere forward.

“The largest portion of our funding will be used to continue building out our engineering teams in the U.S. and Europe, and we will continue investing heavily in open source,” Trifiro said. “As a business targeting enterprises, we will also build out the full complement of sales, marketing, support and training teams required to address that market.”

While DCOS represents the evolution of Apache Mesos, the Mesos technology platform is already deployed at Web scale companies including Twitter.

“The Mesosphere DCOS automates common operations and makes your entire data center programmable,” Florian Leibert, CEO and co-founder of Mesosphere, said in a statement. “We want to give developers the power of the underlying resources without forcing them to worry about the complexity of managing hundreds or even thousands of machines.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Apps Today and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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    Sean Michael

    Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.

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