Mesosphere Inc. kicked off the week with a $36 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures to push its homegrown spin on the concept of a unified data center operating system. The new platform departs from the traditional virtualization model to provide a centralized pool of resources that resembles the average consumer device more than traditional enterprise data centers.

The heart of DCOS, as the startup refers to its solution, is a technology called Apache Mesos that was born from a student project started at UC Berkeley’s celebrated AMPLab in 2009 to simplify the management of large server clusters. It acts as an intermediary between hardware and applications in a similar fashion to conventional operating systems, but it allows multiple workloads to share the same infrastructure with complete isolation.

The Mesos approach contrasts with the way in which most organizations deploy distributed applications, which is by chopping up the data center into virtual partitions each running a different process. That method not only becomes immensely complex to manage in enterprise-scale environments but also leaves hardware underutilized due to the inevitable discrepancy between the static amount of resources provisioned to each virtual machine (VMs) and the changing requirements of the services running inside.

Higher-level architecture

DCOS moves the abstraction up another level, extending the premise of Mesos to all the different architectures and operating paradigms that have developed in data centers over the last few decades, as well as external cloud services. The platform builds on the automated clustering capabilities of the project and adds a graphic user interface and a command-line tool that allows practitioners to manage the different components of their infrastructure in a consolidated manner while still retaining visibility into every corner of the data center.

The package also includes a collection of pre-integrated technologies from different parts of the open-source ecosystem rounding out DCOS into a full-fledged operating system. Organizations can store their data in Hadoop, deploy applications using Docker and its newly released companion tools and handle the flow of information leveraging Apache Kafka. Other solutions are available for download as well from an online repository that fills of the role of a dedicated app store and comes in an on-premise version for security-conscious organizations.

Finally, Mesosphere is offering a development kit designed to expedite the creation of applications for its platform, a key factor in driving adoption. The new funding, which also saw the participation of existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and Fuel Capital in addition to Khosla, is meant to help the startup prop up demand even further and expand global operations.

The investment comes only six months after Mesosphere bagged $10.5 million in its first round of funding and brings its total capital raised to approximately $50 million. DCOS is set to hit general availability sometime next year.