Morphlabs Inc, the start-up revving up to go into direct competition with Eucalyptus Systems hawking its take on the same Eucalyptus open source cloud platform to the same customer set, has gotten a $5.5 million B round to fuel its coming push in the U.S. and Japan.

The rivalry may be a little uneven. Eucalyptus Systems just got $20 million and reportedly has a lot of its $5.5 million first round left.

Morphlabs CEO Winston Damarillo says the round was oversubscribed so the amount might actually work out to be more. It was led by Global Gateway Investment Group (G2iG) with new investor Frontera Group joining existing investors CSK Venture Capital and AO Capital Partners.

Morphlabs recently launched a ready-for-production private cloud appliance called mCloud Controller targeting service providers and the enterprise. It claims to be seeing market traction particularly in Japan where it has just appointed Satoshi Konno president of Japan operations.

Damarillo, like Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos, has experience selling an open source company. IBM bought Gluecode Software off of him in 2005, the only open source company it ever bought. It is used as an entry ramp to WebSphere. Mickos sold MySQL to Sun and got a billion dollars for it.