Press Release- At today’s Spark Summit 2014, DataStax, the leading distributed database management system that delivers Apache Cassandra to the enterprise, announced the general availability of DataStax Enterprise 4.5 (DSE 4.5). DSE 4.5 delivers blazing performance and is now even easier to develop against, deploy and operate. With this release, CIOs can more readily align enterprise technology with business requirements and are free to focus on delivering innovative customer-facing applications. 


PERSPECTIVES ON THE NEWS 


“Today’s always-on, ever-adapting digital world presents new challenges for businesses,” said Robin Schumacher, vice president of products, DataStax. “CIOs are currently being forced to shoehorn a new paradigm into old technologies. DataStax Enterprise 4.5 eliminates this constraint because it was built from the ground up with modern businesses in mind.” 


“By moving away from relational technologies, our institutions and instructors now have real-time insight on statistics like average test scores on hundreds of university courses and across millions of students,” said Chanan Braunstein, Director of the Next Gen Homework Applications at Pearson Education. “DataStax’s new analytics capability gives us a high-performance way to quickly analyse our constantly growing data.”


“Spark and Cassandra form a natural bond by combining industry leading analytics with a high-performance transactional database,” said Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, head of business development, Databricks. “The Databricks team is thrilled to be working with Datastax to deliver a unified platform that seamlessly integrates enterprise search, security, in-memory, and analytics, making it even easier for organisations to build and deploy scalable online applications.”

LIGHTNING FAST IN-MEMORY ANALYTICS WITH SPARK

Following a recently announced partnership with Databricks, DataStax has integrated Spark for real-time analytics into DataStax Enterprise. DataStax Enterprise 4.5 is the only distributed database management system for online applications with both in-memory transactional and analytical capabilities, scalability for any sized workload, enterprise search, comprehensive security, and transparent management services.

AUTOMATED DIAGNOSTICS AND PERFORMANCE TUNING DRIVES OPERATIONAL SIMPLICITY

DataStax Enterprise 4.5 adds a new Performance Service to its suite of automatic management services designed to simplify operations. This new functionality removes the mystery of how well a cluster is performing by supplying diagnostic information that can easily be queried. Further, DSE 4.5 automatically scans clusters, visually identifies issues, and provides expert advice on resolving problems.

ENHANCED VISUAL MANAGEMENT SUPPLIES GREATER EASE OF USE
Enhanced visual management supplies even greater ease of use and built-in security for managing large enterprise systems. In addition to visually enabling best practices enforcement and providing customised performance monitoring, a single installation of OpsCenter can now support the management of 1,000+ node clusters.

SEAMLESS INTEGRATION WITH HADOOP

With 4.5, for the first time companies can now merge Cassandra data with Hadoop and easily integrate operational and historical data together. To build on DataStax’s commitment, we have forged solid partnerships with Hadoop vendors Cloudera and Hortonworks and DSE has been certified for their platforms.

DATASTAX ENTERPRISE TRANSFORMS BUSINESSES

• Integrated, Fast Analytics: 100 times faster in-memory transactional and 
analytics support workloads of any size and type.
• New Performance Service: Eliminates the ‘black-box’ feel to Cassandra via built-in performance objects, best practices enforcement, expert recommendations, and tracing of worst running statements.
• Enhanced Visual Management: Support for 1,000+ node clusters, built-in security, and point-and-click remote management from any device make managing online applications a breeze.
• Operational Simplicity: One single platform with integrated analytics, enterprise search, automatic management services, security, and Hadoop support.
• Cloudera and HortonWorks Partnership and Certification: Seamless integration with leading Hadoop vendors ensures that historical and real-time data are joined together to derive astoundingly accurate results.