Mesosphere, the San Francisco based start-up, has rolled out a one of a kind Data Center Operating System (DCOS) based on the open source Apache Mesos project and to help it with further development, the outfit has garnered $36m in funding.

The announcement came earlier this week as Khosla Ventures led a fresh round, along with Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, and SV Angel. Raking in $10 million earlier this year the total funds raised is now $48.85 million.

Brad Silverberg, co-founder of Fuel Capital explained, “Virtual machines are a step along the way, but the new breed of datacenter services run across fleets of machines. The Mesosphere DCOS is the first operating system to unleash the full power of the cloud — you can run existing applications, but you can also build new applications, bringing automation to processes that otherwise require too much human oversight and simply do not scale.”

The Mesosphere DCOS “pools compute resources and automates common operations,” to providing developers and operators with “an interface to automate allocation and deallocation of datacenter resources to run today’s most popular distributed applications and services.” Twitter, Airbnb and Hubspot are some of the sites running on Mesosphere tech.

According to their press release, key features of DCOS include:

• A distributed systems kernel with enterprise-grade security, based on Apache Mesos.
• A set of core system services, including a distributed init system (Marathon), distributed cron (Chronos), service discovery (DNS), storage (HDFS), and others, all capable of launching containers at scale.
• A user interface, including a command line for controlling the Mesosphere DCOS and visual tools for understanding how your datacenter is operating.
• Killer apps and an ecosystem of datacenter services, including Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop, Apache YARN, Apache HDFS, and Google’s Kubernetes, supported by Mesosphere and third parties as native services on the Mesosphere DCOS.
• A public and private repository, which allows operators to deliver third-party and custom-built datacenter services to their business with a one-command install.
• An API and software development kit (SDK) that lets programmers develop against datacenter like it’s one big computer, which aids quickly building applications and services that scale with built-in high availability and fault tolerance.
• Support for a wide variety of platforms, including:
  • All modern versions of Linux: Redhat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and CoreOS
  • On-cloud: Amazon, Google, DigitalOcean, Microsoft, Rackspace, VMware
  • On-premise: Bare metal, VMware, OpenStack

“This is an operating system being built by distributed systems developers, to tackle the biggest inefficiencies that we see in how today’s applications and services interface with compute resources,” points out Florian Leibert, CEO and Co-Founder at Mesosphere.

“From resource sharing, to handling failure, and everything in between – the mission of the DCOS is to bring automation where automation makes sense, and to give developers and operators much finer grained control of their environments, while freeing them from low level plumbing,” he further added.

It has a workforce of nearly 40 people and is set to rise to 120 by the end of 2015, reports VentureBeat.

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(Image credit: John McStravick)