Quest Software, Inc. announced today that it has added Apache Cassandra, an open source NoSQL database, to its list of supported NoSQL platforms with the second beta release of Toad for Cloud Databases. Toad now supports data access and management for Apache Cassandra, Amazon SimpleDB, Microsoft Azure Table Services, Apache HBase, and any open database connectivity-enabled relational database.
Quest has also announced a technology alliance with Riptano, a Cassandra services and support company, to perform research on enterprise needs and use cases for deploying Cassandra. "Quest is helping increase enterprise use of NoSQL databases by developing products such as Toad for Cloud Databases that integrate these new, lower cost platforms into existing enterprise information systems," notes Christian Hasker, director of product management for database management business at Quest Software.
"We see that the dynamics in the data center are changing, in particular, around the database layers," Billy Bosworth, vice president and general manager for Quest's database business unit, tells 5 Minute Briefing. With Cassandra's ability to handle the "incredible scaling demands" of today's data centers, it is becoming an increasingly viable supplemental component to people's storage needs and their application needs, he adds.
As one of the stalwarts in the traditional relational database business, Quest has millions of customers who are now going to be faced with understanding, exploring, testing, and figuring out where their applications fit in this new database paradigm, adds Bosworth. Quest, he says, sees itself as a company that can help traditional RDBMS users get up to speed on new technologies in familiar interfaces so they can understand where and how to use it. "We are going to be that bridge, helping our customers move from the traditional RDBMSs world, into this new database world."
"From the Riptano perspective, we see a lot of customers in almost every market vertical have a large demand for the ability to scale their data as it grows in an incremental format, and they demand extremely high performance as they do that. Cassandra does that extremely well." says Matt Pfeil, co-founder and CEO, Riptano, pointing out that Cassandra was open sourced by Facebook back in 2008 and used internally there, and is being adopted now not only among web 2.0 companies but also across traditional enterprises.
According to Quest and Riptano, the new technology alliance provides the underpinnings for the two companies to investigate the need for tools around monitoring, diagnostics and data movement between relational databases and Cassandra that would provide multi-data center replication. Depending on the companies' research findings, plans to develop such tools could be in the works for 2011.
Quest and Riptano will share their findings and educate the community on Cassandra's benefits primarily through CloudDBPedia, a product-neutral online knowledgebase for free education and training on NoSQL and cloud databases. CloudDBPedia provides videos, podcasts, blogs, and a community-run wiki focused on various NoSQL technologies, like Cassandra.
"One of the great things about being an independent software vendor is that we are really trying to help our customers look at an open future of choices," says Quest's Bosworth. "Whatever you decide is the right technology for your particular application need, and for your particular data center need, we want to be that company that can help you maximize the efficiency and adoption rate of whatever technology you want to use," says Bosworth. "And, as the stack wars continue to enflame around everybody wanting to own their whole hardware and software stack, we think that independence is going to give you a big vision into an open set of choices."
For more information about Quest, go here, and for more about Riptano, go here.