In Brief The snuggles between Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Microsoft continue; this time with the companies getting in on the Series C funding round of cluster management startup Mesosphere.

Mesosphere has managed to raise $73.5m in its Series C funding round, it announced today, bringing its total funding to just under $126m.

The business initially launched in 2015 with its Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) and is based on Apache Mesos, "the operating system for datacenters", a cluster management technology which put Twitter's infamous “Fail Whale” to bed.

DCOS is hyped – to HPE and Microsoft delight – for clustering cloud, big data, and container operations on single platforms. It was conjoined with Azure last April to deliver “a simple, powerful command line; an intuitive datacenter dashboard; broad support for popular computing frameworks; and the rock-solid container management capabilities of Mesos.”

HPE itself unleashed its Haven OnDemand service for customers earlier this month, which was backed on Microsoft Azure. Details on the commercial relationship between the pair, and with Mesosphere, are not clear.

Mesophere's announcement stated: "Going forward, we expect our relationships with HPE and Microsoft to pay huge dividends for all of the companies involved—us, them and the customers that trust us." ®