Juniper, Seagate stuff cash down Cloudscaling's OpenStack trousers

Randy Bias's biz bags $10m in new round

The founders at Cloudscaling - one of the myriad companies trying to become the "Linux of the cloud" by enhancing and commercializingthe OpenStack cloud control freak - have just landed a second wad of cash from investors.

Cloudscaling was founded in the middle of 2009 by Randy Bias, the company's CTO, and Adam Waters, the COO and got an initial and unknown lump of dough from Trinity ventures back in September 2011. That was after Bias and Waters had bootstrapped Cloudscaling all by their lonesome and built a company with 25 employees and had built five clouds for customers. The company decided in 2010 to work exclusively on OpenStack, and announced its Open Cloud System 2.5, based on the "Grizzly" release of OpenStack, a month ago.

Significantly, OCS 2.5, which ships this summer, uses Contrail Controller and other virtual networking features that have been licensed from Juniper Networks. This is significant because Juniper participated in the Series B funding round of $10m, as did disk maker Seagate. The latter company was already working on storage optimizations for OCS. Trinity Ventures also kicked in some more dough. How much money each company stuffed down the Cloudscaling trousers was not disclosed.

El Reg has said it before, and it will say it again. With Cloudscaling partnering so tightly with Juniper through the adoption of the Contrail virtual networking stack and now Juniper being an investor, it would not be at all surprising to see Juniper come to the conclusion that it needs to have its own OpenStack distribution and snap up Cloudscaling. ®