Netflix, Openwave Messaging and Ooyala Migrate Critical Business Applications from Oracle to DataStax and Apache Cassandra

Scalability, Disaster Avoidance and Cost Savings Named Key Criteria for Industry-Leading Enterprises Moving from Relational Databases to Cassandra NoSQL Database Platform.

CASSANDRA SUMMIT, SAN FRANCISCO, June 11, 2013—DataStax, the company that powers the big data applications that transform business, today announced that dozens of industry-leading enterprises such as Netflix, Openwave Messaging and Ooyala have migrated from traditional Oracle relational database management systems (RDBMS) to DataStax and the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database platform. These organizations cite scalability, disaster avoidance and cost savings as key criteria for selecting Cassandra instead of relational database technologies.

“Many customers such as Netflix, OpenWave and Ooyala are replacing Oracle with DataStax in their most critical line of business applications,” said Billy Bosworth, CEO, DataStax. “Relational databases such as Oracle are built on antiquated architectures that are inadequate for powering today’s online line-of-business applications due to their weak scaling capabilities, disaster vulnerability and massive price tags.”

Netflix Selects Cassandra To Power Streaming Service for Millions of Customers

Netflix is the world’s leading Internet television network with more than 36 million members enjoying more than one billion hours of TV shows and movies per month. Netflix migrated to Cassandra because Oracle created a single point of failure in a database system that couldn’t risk any down time and limited their availability and scalability. Netflix needed a solution that was as flexible as the cloud, and with Cassandra’s globally distributed data model, they could quickly create and manage clusters across multiple data centers.

Today, Netflix stores 95 percent of its data in Cassandra, from customer account information to movie ratings, bookmarks, metadata and logs. With more than 200TB of data in their production clusters, Netflix operates one of the largest cloud platforms in the world. Cassandra provides Netflix with better business agility and removes the need to plan capacity or worry about running out of space or power. Most importantly, the service offers a high degree of availability for Netflix’s members and helps the company create a tailored experience for each individual who visits the site.

“Millions of people visit Netflix each day, and we need to be available for them no matter what,” said Christos Kalantzis, cloud database engineering manager, Netflix. “We chose Cassandra because relational databases cannot provide the scalability and availability that we need to deliver a great customer experience. Cassandra is our database of choice, and enables us to deliver a service that our members count on.”

Openwave Messaging Selects DataStax For Cost-Effectiveness and Availability

Openwave Messaging, a leading global provider of innovative messaging software solutions, needed a better database solution to power their next generation messaging platform for Email, SMS, MMS, voicemail and IP Messaging applications. After evaluating various alternatives, the company selected the DataStax Cassandra database which performs incredibly well using hardware that costs as little as 1/10^th the amount of a comparable Oracle system, delivers significant TCO savings, is highly available, and has multi-data center capabilities that deliver bulletproof disaster resiliency.

“Japan’s terrible earthquake and tsunami disaster in 2011 showed why businesses need geographic redundancy to protect their clients’ data,” said Darshan Rawal, vice president, engineering, Openwave Messaging. “After the earthquake, many clients asked us how we could help them handle disaster situations, and with DataStax’s multi-data center capabilities, we gave them peace of mind that their data would stay available and accessible at all times.”

Fast-Growing Startup Ooyala Scales Its Business With DataStax

Ooyala enables content owners to manage, analyze and monetize the digital video they publish. The company serves hundreds of global media companies, reaches more than 100 million unique viewers and hosts a billion videos each month. At first the company used a MySQL solution from Oracle, but as Ooyala grew, their MySQL database had trouble scaling and became less usable.

Ooyala migrated to DataStax from Oracle because the Cassandra database could predictably scale their massive and highly variable influx of data, which now reaches two billion data points each day. Cassandra enables their database to run smoothly and scale without surprises because they can simply stand up a new cluster whenever they need more capacity.

“We quickly outgrew Oracle’s MySQL solution, and it became clear that relational database technologies were not an option because they could not support our analytics and broader big data initiatives,” said Sean Knapp, executive vice president and chief product officer, Ooyala. “NoSQL big data solutions are becoming the default tools, and we chose DataStax because the Cassandra community was by far the most focused, had the most unified vision and demonstrated incredible execution.”

To learn more about why dozens of industry-leading enterprises are moving from Oracle to DataStax, visit http://www.datastax.com/oracle.

About DataStax

DataStax powers the big data applications that transform business for more than 300 customers, including startups and 20 of the Fortune 100. DataStax delivers a massively scalable, flexible and continuously available big data platform built on Apache Cassandra™. DataStax integrates enterprise-ready Cassandra, Apache Hadoop™ for analytics and Apache Solr™ for search across multi-datacenters and in the cloud.

Companies such as Adobe, Healthcare Anytime, eBay and Netflix rely on DataStax to transform their businesses. Based in San Mateo, Calif., DataStax is backed by industry-leading investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital and Meritech Capital Partners.  For more information, visit DataStax or follow us @DataStax.