Spyced

A month ago I left Rackspace to start Riptano , a Cassandra support and services company. I was in the unusal position of being a technical person looking for a business-savvy co-founder. For whatever reason, the converse seems a lot more common . Maybe technical people tend to sterotype softer skills as being easy. But despite some examples to the contrary (notably for me, Josh Coates at Mozy ), I found that starting a company is too hard for just one person . Unfortunately, all of my fairly slim portfolio of business guys I'd like to co-found with were unavailable. So progress was slow, until Matt Pfeil heard that I was leaving Rackspace and drove to San Antonio from Austin to talk me out of it. Not only was he not successful in talking me out of leaving, but he ended up co-founding Riptano. And here we are, with a Riptano mini-faq. Isn't Cassandra mostly just a web 2.0 thing for ex-mysql shops? Although most of the early adopters fit this stereotype, we...

Cassandra has seen some impressive adoption success over the past months, leading some to conclude that Cassandra is the frontrunner in the highly scalable databases space (a subset of the hot NoSQL category ). Among all the attention, some misunderstandings have been propagated, which I'd like to clear up. Fiction : "Cassandra relies on high-speed fiber between datacenters" and can't reliably replicate between datacenters with more than a few ms of latency between them. Fact : Cassandra's multi-datacenter replication is one of its earliest features and is by far the most battle-tested in the NoSQL space. Facebook had Cassandra deployed on east and west coast datacenters since before open sourcing it. SimpleGeo's Cassandra cluster spans 3 EC2 availability zones , and Digg is also deployed on both coasts. Claims that this can't possibly work are an excellent sign that you're reading an article by someone who doesn't know what he's ta...