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!
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