DataStax, Inc. is a data management company based in Santa Clara, California. The company builds one product, also named DataStax, a storage application which uses Apache Cassandra. As of October 2017, the company has roughly 400 customers distributed in over 50 countries.
History
DataStax was built on the open source NoSQL database Apache Cassandra. Cassandra was initially developed internally at Facebook to handle large data sets across multiple servers, and was released as an Apache open source project in 2008. In 2010, Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil left Rackspace, where they had worked with Cassandra, to launch Riptano in Austin, Texas. Ellis and Pfeil later renamed the company DataStax, and moved its headquarters to Santa Clara, California. The company went on to create its own proprietary version of Cassandra, a NoSQL database called DataStax Enterprise. Version 1.0, released in October 2011, was the first commercial distribution of the Cassandra database, designed to provide real-time application performance and heavy analytics on the same physical infrastructure. It grew to include advanced security controls, graph database models, operational analytics and advanced search capabilities. In September 2014, DataStax raised $106 million in a Series E funding round, raising the total investment in the company to $190 million. In April 2016, the company announced the release of DataStax Enterprise Graph, adding graph data model functionality to DSE. In March 2017, DataStax announced the release of its DSE platform 5.1, which included improved search capabilities, improved security control, improvements to its Graph data management and improvements to operational analytics performance. DataStax also announced a shift in strategy, with an added focus on customer experience applications. Rather than a new set of technologies, the company started to offer advice on best practice to users of its core DSE platform. In April 2018, DataStax released DSE 6, with the new version focused on businesses using a hybrid cloud computing model, with all the benefits of a distributed cloud database on any public cloud or on-premise, twice the responsiveness and ability to handle twice the throughput. In December 2018, DataStax released DSE 6.7, which offer enterprise customers five key new feature upgrades, including: improved analytics, geospatial search, improved data protectionin the cloud, enhanced performance insights and new developer integration tools with our Apache Kafka Connector and certified production Docker images.
