Ever get the feeling that soon there'll be so many clouds we'll never see the sun again? Well, here's another one.

It's called Metacloud.

After quietly starting early last year it's just hit the radar, turning up with an undisclosed investment from Storm Ventures and - according to Wired -former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures.

That makes some sense since Metacloud is headed by Steve Curry, who spent a dozen years at Yahoo managing its global storage operations, responsible for hundreds of petabytes of content and user data.

The other folks involved are émigrés from Ticketmaster, the third largest e-commerce system in the world, including Metacloud CTO Sean Lynch who was head of technical operations there.

Metacloud will be using an enhanced OpenStack, the open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service project, to build subscription-based enterprise-grade managed private clouds. It says the widgetry includes automated deployment, building, scaling and failover of key OpenStock support services.

It's apparently optimized the route to object storage services for high performance, enhanced OpenStack's networking model to conserve data center VLANs and maintain secure tenant separation, and included the Tenant Invite System, an Active Directory enhancement that organizes tenant management across an enterprise.

Ticketmaster manages its worldwide infrastructure of over 3,000 systems with Spine, an open source framework for managing large numbers of Linux systems. Evidently Metacloud is adapting the widgetry to its own purposes.

The company says it'll peddle private clouds customized to the client's workflows and deliver a software stack that'll run on the client's hardware that'll be managed and supported remotely 24/7 by Metacloud's people.

The customer retains control of its virtual servers, data and intellectual property, consumes compute, and passes any heavy lifting off to Metacloud, which claims its team has built private clouds based on OpenStack for Fortune 100 companies, and designed and deployed private cloud infrastructure for some of the world's largest e-commerce sites that are transacting billions annually.

It claims Metacloud is in production deployment at Tableau Software, the BI house, and at least one Fortune 500.

It positions its operational experience as "a unique asset, found nowhere else in the private cloud services sector today." It says feature enhancements will be streamed to accounts, "effectively delivering a private cloud as SaaS."

It says that "Despite the strong appeal of cloud computing, many companies have struggled to find a viable solution to meet their needs. Enterprises frequently cite data locality, cost and pre-existing capital investment as top concerns that keep them from moving to a public cloud."

Metacloud's aiming to head them off so it can dip its bread in the private cloud gravy. IDC projects the private cloud market will reach $11.8 billion by 2014.

It claims Metacloud typically deploys in customer production environments in a tenth the time of a proprietary cloud implementation at half the cost.

There's an interactive demo of the widgetry on Metacloud's web site, where users can build an OpenStack cloud at Test Drive.testdrive.metacloud.com.