Piston Cloud Computing, an outfit founded by former Rackspace and NASA technologists that sells an OpenStack distribution to enterprises, has received US$8m in Series B funding from existing and new investors, the latter group including Cisco Systems.

The financing round follows Series A in July 2011, when the company raised $4.5m. Other new investors are Swisscom Ventures and Data Collective, who together with Cisco have joined Divergent Ventures, Hummer Winblad and True Ventures as principal investors.

Matt Ocko, a co-managing partner at Data Collective, a startup venture capital firm that invests in Big Data companies, said the firm had evaluated multiple opportunities in the OpenStack market and expected growth in the market created by the open-source cloud operating system to continue.

“After extensive strategic industry analysis, we identified Piston Cloud as having the resources, pedigree and proven technology platform to capture the lion’s share of this growing market,” Ocko said.

Piston’s product is called Piston Enterprise OpenStack – a software for building and managing private Infrastructure-as-as-Service clouds on “bare-metal, converged commodity hardware”, according to the company’s own description.

The company also has a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution built on OpenStack it offers through a partnership with the virtualization-optimization firm Gridcentric.

Its Enterprise OpenStack is integrated with Cloud Foundry, which allows the latter company’s open-source Platform-as-a-Service to run on OpenStack.

OpenStack is an open-source project that originated from collaboration between the San Antonio, Texas-based hosting company Rackspace and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Both organizations continued to be closely involved in guiding its development through the release stage.

Piston Cloud’s executive team includes Joshua McKenty, who has formerly contracted at NASA as chief technical architect, where he led development of the space agency’s Nebula cloud infrastructure, which became the basis for OpenStack. Also on the team is Christopher MacGown, a former technologist of the cloud-server provider Slicehost, which Rackspace bought in 2008.

NASA announced it would stop active participation in May 2012, and Rackspace handed the reins over to an independent foundation the following September. The hosting company has since introduced cloud-infrastructure services built on OpenStack.

In January, Dell and Intel participated in a $10m funding round for Mirantis, a company that helps clients build cloud infrastructure based on OpenStack.