Courtesy of Datastax 

Apache Cassandra

Apache Cassandra is the technology of choice for such data-driven organizations as Netflix, eBay,Constant Contact, Comcast, Barracuda Networks and scores of others. And it furnishes the core functionality responsible for the superior real-time big data capabilities in DataStax Enterprise.

Apache Cassandra is renowned in the industry as the only NoSQL solution that can accommodate thecomplex requirements of today’s modern line-of-business applications. It’s architected from the ground up for real-time enterprise databases that require vast scalability, high-velocity performance, flexible schema design and continuous availability.

The benefits Cassandra delivers to your business include:

• Elastic scalability – Allows you to easily add capacity online to accommodate more customers and more data whenever you need.
• Always on architecture – Contains no single point of failure (as with traditional master/slave RDBMS’s and other NoSQL solutions) resulting in continuous availability for business-critical applications that can’t afford to go down, ever.
• Fast linear-scale performance – Enables sub-second response times with linear scalability (double your throughput with two nodes, quadruple it with four, and so on) to deliver response time speeds your customers have come to expect.
• Flexible data storage – Easily accommodates the full range of data formats – structured, semi-structured and unstructured – that run through today’s modern applications. Also dynamically accommodates changes to your data structures as your data needs evolve.
• Easy data distribution – Gives you maximum flexibility to distribute data where you need by replicating data across multiple datacenters, the cloud and even mixed cloud/on-premise environments. Read and write to any node with all changes being automatically synchronized across a cluster.
• Operational simplicity – with all nodes in a cluster being the same, there is no complex configuration to manage so administration duties are greatly simplified.
• Transaction support – Delivers the “AID” in ACID compliance through its use of a commit log to capture all writes and built-in redundancies that ensure data durability in the event of hardware failures, as well as transaction isolation, atomicity, with consistency being tunable.

In addition, Cassandra requires no new equipment and is very economical to run. It also provides data compression (up to 80% in some cases), eliminates the hassle of memory caching software (e.g., memcached), and provides a query language (CQL) that’s similar to SQL, flattening the learning curve.

For complete details on Cassandra’s features and benefits, please read the Introduction to Apache Cassandra white paper.