ScyllaDB Closes $16 Million in Series B Funding to Expand Next-Generation Cassandra Database

Latest round of funding will be used to meet growing demand for performance among core Apache Cassandra users and to launch first ScyllaDB Enterprise Release.

PALO ALTO, CA (Mar 8, 2017) ScyllaDB announced today that it secured $16 million in Series B funding led by Western Digital Capital, Samsung Ventures, Magma Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners. ScyllaDB’s drop-in replacement for Apache Cassandra has completely redefined the performance expectations that both internet and enterprise developers demand from their existing Cassandra deployments. The funding round will be used to accelerate sales and marketing and to expand both open source and enterprise product features.

Several major companies have deployed ScyllaDB in production, including:

  • IBM. “ScyllaDB’s NoSQL database offers a powerful combination of low latency and high availability, making it an attractive option for customers of our Watson Data Platform offering,” says Derek Schoettle, general manager, IBM Watson Data Platform.
  • AppNexus. “We have a 47 node cluster across 5 data centers,” said Andrew Sweeney, VP of Engineering at AppNexus. “With ScyllaDB we were able to reduce hardware cost and achieve great throughput and latency. Had we used Apache Cassandra for the same use case, we estimated that the cluster would have been at least twice as large.”
  • CPI Card Group. “In short, ScyllaDB rocks,” says Mac Smith, engineer at CPI Card Group . “It does exactly what we need [distribute a Cassandra load] runs very fast, and allows us to generate reports against historical data without waiting a month…Love it.”
  • Investing.com. “When we heard of a Cassandra drop-in-replacement, we were skeptics,” says Gabriel Mizrahi, CTO, chief architect at Investing.com. “But very quickly we found it is all true. ScyllaDB completely eliminated latency and garbage issues and its high availability utilization allowed us to shrink the cluster size by half!”

“ScyllaDB redefined Apache Cassandra,” says Dor Laor, founder and CEO of ScyllaDB. “We invite the Apache Cassandra community to join us in our mission to be the number one NoSQL database in performance and availability.”

Previously, database users were forced to choose between Apache Cassandra for availability and Redis for performance. ScyllaDB eliminates this compromise by redesigning Apache Cassandra from scratch. By replacing JVM with performance-enhancing C++ and leveraging the very best from Apache Cassandra in high availability, fault tolerance, and protocol, ScyllaDB offers developers a dramatically higher-performing and resource-effective drop-in replacement resulting in:

  • 10x higher throughput. ScyllaDB was written in C++ with performance in mind and an aim to squeeze every bit of performance from hardware. Shard-per-core, shared-nothing and lock-free designs allow for perfect scale-up linear performance of up to 1,000,000 read/write operations per node.
  • Low and consistent latency. Lockless implementation and a completely independent memory management stack remove the inefficient reliance on JVM or Linux page cache to deliver consistently lower latency at <1 msec levels.
  • High scalability and high availability. Auto-sharding, homogeneous servers, and native multi-datacenter implementation allow seamless linear scaling without compromising on application downtime or performance.
  • Ease of use. ScyllaDB uses Apache Cassandra’s wire protocol, a rich polyglot of drivers, and integration with Spark, Presto, and Graph tools for resource-efficient and performance effective coding. Fully automated and dynamic tuning requires zero configuration and enhances performance straight out of the box.
  • Compaction, streaming, and repair solved. ScyllaDB enables consistent high performance by providing strict service level agreements (SLAs) between foreground and background jobs. ScyllaDB’s “workload conditioning” provides an umbrella of dynamic scheduling algorithms to minimize database operation latency jitter and reduce compaction, streaming, and repair time.

“Every once in awhile there is a team that decides to tackle an intractable technology problem from a completely new angle,” says Adam Fisher, partner at Bessemer Ventures. “ScyllaDB didn’t take any shortcuts in developing an uncompromising NoSQL database that will upend the high-performance database market and we are proud to be investors.”

Launched in 2015, open source ScyllaDB has quickly gained traction within the Apache Cassandra community. Internet and traditional enterprises alike, including Arista Networks, Eniro, and mParticle use ScyllaDB in production for its consistency, performance, and high availability. The ScyllaDB team consists of the technologists behind Qumranet, the company that developed the KVM hypervisor (acquired by Red Hat in 2008) and open source specialists from 13 countries.

“We see exponential demand for compute and storage,” said Mark Long, President Western Digital Capital, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Financial Officer. “We chose to invest in ScyllaDB because of the company’s unique approach to data center efficiency, storage and networking, and they align well with our strategy to improve how data is generated, managed and consumed.”

 

About ScyllaDB

scylladb.com @scylladb

ScyllaDB is an open source NoSQL database that enables developers to build mission critical applications at light speed throughput and ultra low latency. Leveraging a low latency and C++ powered drop-in Apache Cassandra replacement, ScyllaDB offers a consistent, high throughput, highly available, and highly scalable NoSQL database, and is trusted by companies such as IBM, AppNexus, Investing.com, mParticle, and many others.

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