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May 19, 2015

DataStax Announces DSE 4.7

May 19, 2015 – DataStax, the company that delivers Apache Cassandra™ to the enterprise, today announced the general availability of DataStax Enterprise 4.7 (DSE 4.7), the leading database platform purpose-built for the performance and availability demands of web, mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. With significant advancements to integrated enterprise search, analytics, security, in-memory computing, and database management and monitoring, DSE 4.7 is the leading distributed database for mixed workload deployments.

PERSPECTIVES ON THE NEWS

“Enterprise search is an indispensable tool that involves ​locating and analyzing complex data through ​

an easy to use interface,” said Cecil O.Lynch, Chief Medical Information Officer, Accenture. “With DataStax Enterprise 4.7, DataStax simplifies search on real-time patient data to ensure that customer-facing applications are responsive and enable healthcare professionals to find and leverage critical information.”

“With the ever-increasing volume, variety, and velocity of data coming at enterprises today, there is increasing pressure to exploit that data not only for offline strategic decisions, or for tactical adjustments, but for decisions “in the moment”; these are the decisions that drive the real-time enterprise,” said Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, Application Development and Deployment, IDC. “Ensuring that organizations are able to access, and make sense of, this ever-increasing data is critical, and in order to support the mixed workloads that process both transactions and analytics on data, a distributed database environment is a significant factor for success.”

“As the amount of data collected by enterprise web and mobile applications continues to grow at an immense rate, it’s critical to have database systems in place that are capable of providing instant insight into that data,” says Robin Schumacher, Vice President of Products, DataStax. “With DataStax Enterprise 4.7 and OpsCenter 5.2, users can search, analyze, secure and manage all their online data in one platform and ensure it’s immediately available for real-time decision making.”

ENTERPRISE SEARCH, ANALYTICS AND IN-MEMORY FOR MIXED WORKLOADS

DSE 4.7 includes a new certified version of Apache Solr and DSE’s innovative “Live Indexing” capability that makes new data immediately available for search. Whereas typical search systems, including Solr and Elasticsearch, may have gaps involved when new data enters the system and when it is ready for search operations, DSE’s Live Indexing feature immediately indexes incoming data making it instantly available. Furthermore, DSE search leverages Cassandra’s native ability to run across multiple data centers and cloud availability zones, which provides constant uptime for search operations and allows results to be sent back to users in the fastest possible time.

  • Extending Analytics with Search: Developers can utilize Solr search syntax in conjunction with Spark’s SparkSQL, to extend Spark’s analytic query capabilities and deliver lightning fast query response times, all in a single database platform. Search and analytics tasks can run simultaneously on the same machine, thus delivering the potential for lower hardware costs and improved TCO.
  • Intelligent Search Query Routing: Version 4.7 of DSE Search adds the ability for search queries to be transparently routed to the best performing machines in a cluster, which automatically ensures the fastest possible response times for each individual search request.
  • Fault-Tolerant Search Operations: With the ability to customize how a failed search query is handled, developers can deliver advanced capabilities such as partial responses that provide an approximation of search results, or default to a full retry, which is performed automatically.

Upgraded analytics functionality includes a new certified version of Spark version 1.2 along with support for machine learning, JDBC, and easy performance monitoring of Spark performance in DSE’s Performance Service. DSE’s in-memory option has also been improved to address up to 50x more RAM than previous versions. DataStax’s continued investment in search, in-memory and analytics, greatly simplifies the development of mixed workload applications that include transactional, analytical, search and in-memory requirements.

ADVANCED SECURITY MEANS INCREASED DATA PROTECTION

With encryption and external security software support enhancements, DSE 4.7 and OpsCenter 5.2, DataStax’s visual management and monitoring console, deliver heightened data protection to keep data safe at all times. DSE 4.7 delivers upgraded data at rest protection by providing an option to store encryption keys, needed to “unlock” the data for use, on servers outside the DSE cluster. In addition, OpsCenter now supports the use of LDAP and Active Directory to manage administration security, making it easy to control what administrators and operations personnel can do on database clusters.

EASILY SCALE AND MONITOR DATABASES ACROSS THE GLOBE

OpsCenter 5.2 allows administrators to easily expand into new territories, add new on-premise data centers and provide additional cloud availability zones when needed. OpsCenter’s new visual features for multi-data center operations helps administrators efficiently provision, administer, and monitor multi-site databases, while new visual performance dashboards with expert recommendations help simplify performance tuning.

INCLUDES PRODUCTION-CERTIFIED CASSANDRA 2.1

DSE 4.7 includes a production-certified version of Cassandra 2.1, bringing features such as user defined types, improved counters, more efficient repair operations, and much more to DSE.

Availability

DataStax Enterprise 4.7 is currently available and OpsCenter 5.2 will be available in late June 2015. Free versions of DataStax Enterprise for non-production use are available for download here.

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