Commercial Open Source Infrastructure-as-a-Service startup Eucalyptus is back in the news again with the announcement of a new $20 million round of financing.  The new round is led by NEA, as well as Benchmark and BV Capital participating in follow on rounds for themselves.

After recently announcing their 2.0 release and new partner program they definitely seemed like they will be gearing up for the up and coming private cloud feeding frenzy which is just underway and should be escalating quite high by the end of the year when VMWare enters the market officially.  The money should give them ample amo to build out their next phases of the company on the business side of things, while also putting some resources towards helping accelerating community education and adoption, which is always critical for Commercial Open Source startups.

Waiting in the wings are several competitors which will be gunning for the early leader, especially newly announced Nimbula, founded by former Amazon EC2 team lead Chris Pinkham.  Nimbula, who is coming out of the gates with guns blazing and $6 million in initial funding.  Pinkham seems to be targeting Eucalyptus specifically, with comments that claim Nimbula is a step forward over other cloud platforms like Eucalyptus in the degree to which it scales.

Congrats to the Eucalyptus team on their funding, we look forward to seeing how they put it to use while this early private cloud market takes shape.