Start-up Mesosphere has announced what it calls a datacenter operating system (DCOS), based on the open source Apache Mesos project, and won $36 million in venture capital funding.

Mesos abstracts all data center resources including servers, storage and networking, and Mesosphere packages this as a commercially-supported offering. The funding is led by Khosla Ventures, the VC fund created by Sun Microsystems co-founder vinod Khosla.

Mesosphere arrives
“The industry needs a new type of operating system to optimize and automate the complex landscape inherent to the agile IT era: a growing fleet of distributed web, mobile, analytic server applications, operated as application-centric abstractions on commodity server and storage pools in dedicated datacenters and public
clouds,” said Khosla. "Mesosphere has assembled a world-class team to deliver this software foundation that makes it as easy to run massive distributed server applications as it is to run an app on your smartphone or PC.”

Mesosphere’s DCOS provides an API to automate allocation and management of datacenter resources, as well as a software development kit (SDK) and supports distributed environments including Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra  and Google’s Kubernetes.

The Mesosphere DCOS supports Linux applications and runs with Amazon AWS, Google GCE, Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, VMware vCloud Air. It can also run on-premise on bare metal or on top of a virtualized private cloud, such as with VMware or OpenStack.
 
"Today's applications and services have outgrown single servers,” said Florian Leibert, CEO and co-founder of Mesosphere. "The datacenter needs an operating system. The Mesosphere DCOS automates common operations and makes your entire datacenter programmable."