Highly-scalable, Open Source "NoSQL" Distributed Database Handles Massive Workloads for Cisco, Constant Contact, DataStax, Digg, IBM, Netflix, Rackspace, Twitter, Walmart Labs, and more.

Forest Hill, MD – 18 October 2011 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache Cassandra™ v1.0. The highly-scalable, distributed "NoSQL" database plays a key role in Cloud computing by quickly handling massive workloads in real time with minimal disruption to services or systems.
"Dealing with very large amounts of data in realtime is a must for most businesses today," said Jonathan Ellis, Vice President of Apache Cassandra. "Cassandra accommodates high query volumes, provides enterprise-grade reliability, and scales easily to meet future growth requirements – while using fewer resources than traditional solutions."
Apache Cassandra is successfully used by large scale organizations such as Cisco, Cloudkick, Digg, Rackspace, Reddit, Twitter, and Walmart Labs to affordably process massive data sets in real-time across large server clusters. The largest Cassandra production cluster to date exceeds 300 terabytes of data over 400 machines.
"As the most-widely deployed mobile rich media advertising platform, Medialets uses Apache Cassandra™ for handling time series based logging from our production operations infrastructure," said Joe Stein, Chief Architect of Medialets. "We store contiguous counts for data points for each second, minute, hour, day, month so we can review trends over time as well as the current real time set of information for tens of thousands of data points. Cassandra makes it possible for us to manage this intensive data set and the release of 1.0 makes it that much easier."
Deployed across an array of applications, from barcode scanning and geospatial databases to storing user account information and activity logs, Apache Cassandra is easily scalable, efficient, and  performant, typically handling over 5,000 requests per second per core. Innovative uses of Apache Cassandra include:

  • AppScale – back-end for Google App Engine applications
  • Clearspring – tracking URL sharing and serving over 200 million daily view requests
  • Cloudtalk –  creating messaging applications
  • Constant Contact –  powering social media marketing applications
  • Formspring – counting/storing social graph data for 26 million accounts with 10 million daily responses
  • Mahalo.com – recording user Q & A activity logs and topics 
  • Netflix – streaming services back-end database
  • Openwave – distributed storage mechanism for next generation messaging platform
  • OpenX – storing and replicating advertisements and targeting data for ad delivery over 130 nodes
  • Plaxo – analyzing 3 billion contacts against public data sources and identifying 600 million unique contacts
  • RockYou – recording every single click in real time for 50 million online gaming users
  • Urban Airship – mobile service hosting for over 160 million application installs across 80 million unique devices 
  • Yakaz – storing millions of images and social data
Matthew Conway, CTO of Backupify said, "Apache Cassandra™ makes it possible for us to build a business around really high write loads in a scalable fashion without having to build and operate our own sharding layer. The release of Cassandra 1.0 is an exciting milestone for the project and we look forward to exploring the new features and performance enhancements."
"We utilize Apache Cassandra™ to deliver DataStax Enterprise, a distributed data platform that makes it easy for customers to build, deploy, and operate elastically scalable on-premise and cloud-optimized applications," explained Billy Bosworth, CEO of DataStax. "We chose Cassandra to power this platform because of it's real-time scalability, operational simplicity, and above all, its active community of dedicated developers. Version 1.0 is the culmination of their efforts and we look forward to seeing Cassandra 1.0 power our customers applications."

Originally developed at Facebook in 2008, Cassandra entered the Apache Incubator in 2009, and graduated as an Apache Top-Level Project (TLP) in February 2010. Apache Cassandra v1.0 will be featured in the "Data Handling & Analytics" track at ApacheCon, 7-11 November 2011, in Vancouver, Canada. To register, visit http://apachecon.com/.

Availability and Oversight
Apache Cassandra software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a Project Management Committee (PMC) that guides the Project's day-to-day operations, community development, and product releases. Apache Cassandra source code, downloads, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://cassandra.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server -- the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 350 individual Members and 3,000 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, HP, Hortonworks, IBM, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

"Apache", "Apache Cassandra", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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