Private cloud firm Blue Box has won $4 million in venture capital funding, following on from $10 million it gained in October 2014.

The Seattle-based company offers private cloud as a service, based on the OpenStack platform, with data centers in Seattle, Virginia and Zurich. Customers get dedicated hardware from Blue Box which they can combine with internal IT and public cloud services. The company competes with other offerings from providers such as Mirantis.

The investors include previous Blue Box supporter Voyager Capital, as well as an unnamed telecoms company which will be offering the Blue Box cloud service to its own customers.

OpenStack support
“The combination of our unique IP and true operating experience makes it possible for Blue Box to deliver consistent, reliable, efficient, and agile private cloud infrastructure as a service directly and through channel partners,” said Blue Box CEO Matthew Schiltz.

The open source OpenStack platform, originally started by NASA and Rackspace, is riding high with strong industry support, and plenty of service providers offering products based on it.

Giants such as HP are supporting OpenStack, though its Helion OpenStack business is still a small part of an overall proprietary cloud offering.

This year, Rackspace is migrating its final legacy cloud customers into its OpenStack cloud, pointing out in the process that OpenStack offers much better flexibility and facilities than older and more proprietary closed offerings.