Tag: Riak CS

Basho Releases Enterprise Riak 2.0 With Apache Solr Powered Search And Expanded Support For Distributed Data Types

Basho technologies today announces the release of Riak Enterprise 2.0, the production-grade NoSQL database that competes primarily with Cassandra. Riak Enterprise 2.0 features renovated search functionality by means of the integration of Apache Solr, the open source enterprise search platform. Each Riak node will now contain an instance of Apache Solr that enables enhanced search functionality throughout the Riak platform. This release also features expanded support for distributed data types such as counters, sets, flags and maps that facilitate conflict resolution in an eventually consistent data environment. Use cases for Riak involve datasets that change both with limited frequency and in real-time. The use case marked by a limited rate of change of data includes customers in the insurance and claims industry that leverage Riak to allow their members to locate physician practices or the nearest automobile repair center. Conversely, other use cases for Riak involve data collection from household appliances or devices such as fitness wearables marked by hugely dynamic data streams.

In addition to enhanced search functionality and an expanded range of distributed data types, Riak Enterprise 2.0 features simplified configuration management and more advanced security via more finely grained role-based access functionality. In all, today’s release represents a notable enrichment of a product that, in conjunction with Riak CS, is used by a third of Fortune 50 companies for applications and cloud storage. The release of Riak Enterprise 2.0 builds upon a recent decision by the National Health Service to use Basho’s Enterprise Riak platform to power Spine, the NHS’s electronic medical records platform that stores data for over 20,000 points of medical care across England. As such, Riak Enterprise 2.0 signals the intensification of battles for market share in the key-value NoSQL space, particularly given DataStax’s recent hefty $106M Series E capital raise.

Q&A With Dave McCrory, CTO of Basho Technologies, Regarding Riak, Riak CS and the NoSQL Landscape

Cloud Computing Today recently had the privilege of speaking with Dave McCrory, CTO of Basho Technologies, about the NoSQL space and Basho’s competitive differentiation within the NoSQL landscape. McCrory elaborated on Basho’s Riak “open source, distributed database” by noting its high availability, scalability and ability to handle any type of data as follows:

Cloud Computing Today: How do you envision the NoSQL space? What are your high level impressions of the competitive landscape amongst NoSQL vendors?

Dave McCrory (Basho Technologies): The NoSQL industry has many players for various use cases, but overall it is still young, especially from the enterprise point of view. I’ve been involved in big data for quite some time, and as data continues to grow, the NoSQL industry will grow with it. As the early adopters begin to move to the early majority – we are positioned in that space for crossing that chasm. Looking at how people want to build applications and data we will see, as an industry, in the next few years nearly half of enterprises will embrace NoSQL technologies to deal with the problems that traditional databases cannot deal with. Other NoSQL providers like MongoDB have an amazing presence in the market as it has made it easy for developers to give it a try. From my understanding from the market view, at the same time, it is limited in the actual applications that can be used. With so many companies offering NoSQL solutions for specific use cases and the high demand for data management, I can only see the industry continuing to expand and thrive.

Cloud Computing Today: Where do you see Basho within the larger NoSQL space at present?

Dave McCrory (Basho Technologies): We’re looking to provide the strongest key value solution and object store we can – that’s our priority right now. Although we at Basho are still a fairly young company, I think our technology speaks for itself. Since starting at Basho in the spring, I’ve been able to work with the outstanding Basho engineers and I’m amazed by what they have accomplished. Riak and Riak CS use simplified administrative features and a key/value system which enable anyone with command line experience to build a cluster in less than 15 minutes. I believe that Riak’s simplicity and usability are what separates it from other companies in the NoSQL space.

Some of that usability is our differentiation expressed in terms of high availability, fault tolerance and the ability to scale well beyond many of our competitors.

Cloud Computing Today: What are the key differentiators of Riak? What does Basho have planned for Riak in subsequent releases in the near future?

Dave McCrory (Basho Technologies): Riak’s key differentiators are its ability to offer high availability, massive scale and a variety of data types. Since Riak stores data as binary it is able to handle any type of data, unlike other solutions. Its top features include operational ease at large scales, always-on availability, and the ability to add and remove nodes easily and quickly as needed.

We are unique in that we have built object storage on our foundation and offer both key value and object store from the same platform. We have a thriving community, but our go to market in very focused on the enterprise. That has resulted in almost 200 enterprise customers including a third of the Fortune 50.

We have a lot planned for Basho and Riak in the coming months. We recently launched Riak CS 1.5 which offers additional Amazon S3 compatibility, performance improvement in garbage collection processes, and new, simplified administrative features. We are releasing Riak 2.0 in the fall which will provide enhanced search capability, expanded data types and more customer control over consistency, and we are hosting the annual RICON conference in Las Vegas in October, so you’ll be hearing a lot from Basho the rest of the year!

Basho Appoints New CEO And CTO To Lead Riak, Its NoSQL Database Platform

Today, Basho named Adam Wray as CEO and Dave McCrory as CTO after recently losing outgoing CEO Greg Collins and CTO Justin Sheehy to other ventures. An open-source distributed database used by the likes of Best Buy, Comcast and the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, Basho’s flagship technology Riak delivers an enterprise-grade NoSQL platform marked by scalability, high availability and fault tolerance that can handle rapidly expanding datasets such as those from the internet of things, or telemetry, web-based and digital gaming data. In addition to Riak, Basho is the creator of Riak CS, a cloud-based object storage database. Incoming CEO Adam Wray commented on the market opportunity for Basho as follows:

Enterprises are getting serious about production-capable unstructured databases that scale, like NoSQL, and Basho is able to help them address this. Riak partners and investors support this need, and we have a long list of companies engaged to leverage our solutions – including The Weather Company, Best Buy and Comcast. I am looking forward to working with the management team and collaborating with the community and stakeholders to take advantage of the increasing enthusiasm within enterprises for non-structured databases that can scale across production environments.

Prior to Basho, Wray was most recently President and CEO of Iaas vendor Tier 3, which he grew to a company with a $10M+ annual rate from a startup with a small client base. Tier 3 was acquired by CenturyLink in November 2013. Previously, he held leadership roles at Amazon, Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks. CTO McCrory comes to Basho after having served as SVP of engineering at Warner Music Group, senior architect at Cloud Foundry and cloud architect at VMware. Basho’s Riak technology competes against the likes of MongoDB, Cassandra, DataStax, CouchDB and Couchbase in a competitive NoSQL landscape that looks set to explode as enterprises become increasingly comfortable acquiring and managing non-relational datasets.