Opscode has landed an $11 million venture capital round led by Battery Ventures as the Seattle IT infrastructure startup looks to double its workforce this year. The new money -- raised at a positive valuation -- follows the company's $2.5 million series A round last year from Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Opscode also is launching its open source infrastructure automation tool, known as Chef, to the broader tech community.

"We automate common tasks that software developers and systems administrators used to have to do manually," said co-founder and CEO Jesse Robbins. Those tasks can include everything from configuring servers to managing software deployments.

Opscode has been testing Chef -- which Robbins dubs an automation tool for the masses -- with companies such as 37Signals, Etsy, Scribd, Wikia, and WhitePages.

Robbins

The 2-year-old company has 20 employees, including 15 in Seattle. It plans to double that number this year, though Robbins said the hiring bar is pretty high so they may end the year in the 30 to 35 person range.

At this point, Robbins said they are not so much focused on the sales aspect of the business. "Right now, we are taking a first step and we are not really super focused on the sales side," said Robbins, who previously held the title of "Master of Disaster" at Amazon.com. "We are much more focused on just getting people using and excited about the services that we offer and then continuing to innovate and offer new ones that build on top of the core platform that we offer."

Still, Opscode plans to make money by charging clients a small management fee to run the Chef open source service. The service is free for the first five nodes under management, say a laptop and four Amazon EC2 nodes. It costs $50 per month for up to 20 nodes and then $5 per month beyond that.

GigaOm reports that Opscode is taking on some big competitors, including HP's Opsware, IBM's Tivoli and BMC Software.

As a result of the new investment, Sunil Dhaliwal of Battery Ventures has joined the company's board of directors.

"We are witnessing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make world-class IT infrastructure available to the masses," said Dhaliwal in a statement. "While legacy vendors have made billions solving discrete automation problems for very large organizations, the future belongs to those that can deliver simple, scalable automation to any IT user, regardless of their size or sophistication."

Robbins said there's been a lot of chatter in the tech community about how long it will take large organizations to make the transition to a new software distribution model.

"What we have found is that a bottoms up approach has been working really, really well," said Robbins, pointing to the success of Amazon's EC2. "So the question for everybody in the market right now -- and it is probably a $50 billion market -- is how long is it going to take for these big shops to shift to more agile, efficient models and what is required to make them do that."

Robbins said everyone is trying to figure out the best distribution model to address that transition, adding that what keeps him up as an entrepreneur is how long that process will take.