RainStor Adds Funding, Investors, Readies Nearline Archive Rampup
March 10, 2010 1 Comment
RainStor, a firm I discussed as Clearpace in a June 2009 post, had some very good news this week. $7.5 million in Series B funding 
came in from Informatica, Storm Ventures and its previous investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and The Dow Chemical Company. RainStor plans to “use the funding to expand into new markets, grow its partner base, and invest in product development and R&D” says the press release. Read more of this post
(MicroStrategy has been doing a lot of seeding with the ADBMSs lately; it also has an introductory bundling deal with Sybase IQ.) Delivering a ‘compute rich’ appliance on commodity hardware, with reduced operating costs, certainly hits all the right notes. But is 1 Tb the sweet spot for MapReduce? I think not – although it makes a great starting point, and that may be Aster’s real opportunity – give ‘em a taste of what SQL plus MapReduce can do, and watch them demand more and more. And sell it to them. Dell and MicroStrategy should love this strategy - if it works. 
ParAccel has seen some skepticism in the analyst community because of its relatively small published number of customers. It claims a dozen, and half are listed on its web site. Other vendors, like Vertica and Greenplum, have been very forthcoming promoting theirs, but both have more time in the market. PADB was released in Q4 2007 and really began its arc in 2008; Vertica has a year head start, and Greenplum even more. Rumors have also floated about whether CTO and founder Barry Zane was leaving. I had a conversation with Barry in late June to discuss the business and the benchmarks. He was clearly excited about the benchmarks, in which he was very involved, even working on the full disclosure report personally – “It got to be like a hobby for me,” he said – and he was quite clear that he is not going anywhere. 
Greenplum 
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