It’s always nice to hear about Portland startups securing capital. It’s downright exciting when you hear that a local open source startup is getting funding.

And that’s the case today with Puppet Labs—the makers of a leading open source server configuration management and provisioning solution—as they announced that they have closed a $5 million second round, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

A little over a year ago, Puppet (then called Reductive Labs) announced that they had secured $2 million in capital and that they were relocating the company to Portland. Today, marks another step forward for the growing company.

But what exactly does Puppet’s solution do? Well, it helps companies like Twitter deal with their massive farms of servers, quickly and easily. Or as Puppet puts it:

Puppet is an open source data center automation and configuration management framework. Puppet provides system administrators with a simplified platform that allows for consistent, transparent, and flexible systems management.

Puppet lets System Administrators spend less time on mundane tasks and instead focus on managing their infrastructure strategically.

And with the growing number of massive Web applications with massive user bases and technology implementations, that’s a really good space in which to be. Investors recognize that. And they’re putting their money where their mouth is.

“Puppet is backed by a large community and thousands of users. Sys admins everywhere know and love Puppet because it makes their life easier,” said Kevin Compton, Partner at Radar Partners and new Puppet Labs board member, in a press release. “Puppet Labs is uniquely positioned in the market and has a tremendous opportunity because it’s going up against legacy systems or manual, do-it-yourself processes that have to be written from scratch for each system, every time. Puppet is a platform to automate that entire procedure.”

According to Mike Rogoway over at The Oregonian, Puppet will be dipping its toe in the proprietary waters, as well.

Puppet, formerly called Reductive Labs, plans to use the money to ramp up its engineering team. It will add a vice president and several more developers to improve its software, according to chief executive Luke Kanies, and lease bigger offices within the city.

The company will also release a major update to its software today. And Kanies said Puppet will soon add proprietary options for specific applications.

“The main goal of this funding round is to begin offering commercial software to complement our open source” products, [CEO Luke Kaines] said.

For more information on the funding, read the Puppet press release. Or read the additional Puppet coverage from ReadWriteWeb, Xconomy, VentureBeat, peHub, and GigaOm. For more information on the company and its solutions, visit Puppet Labs or follow PuppetLabs on Twitter.

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