DataStax, a commercial distributor of the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database is reflecting on the past year. The company reached several milestones in the past year, as did Cassandra, and there are high hopes surrounding both as we enter 2012.

DataStax passed the 100 clients landmark last year, in addition to raising a second round of funding.  LightSpeed Venture Partners and Crosslink injected $11 into the company. The interest from VCs and customers followed DataStax’s first two launches, kicked off with the debut of the OpsCenter for Apache Cassandra management and visibility platform for the open-source database. The company claims it’s currenly the number one operations app for Cassandra, though it didn’t disclose by which indicator.

Seven months after the launch of OpsCenter, DataStax revealed its commercial version of the NoSQL DB it based its business on – and also took the opportunity to announce the series B funding round. DataStax Enterprise  plugs into OpsCenter, providing customers with an integrated offering that’s designed to handle Hadoop-powered big data jobs.

In addition to compiling a list of achievements, DataStax released some data that provides an interesting glimpse to the trends in this particular segment of the NoSQL DB industry. Web app providers and companies that do write-intensive data mining, real-time analytics, Hadoop batch analytics and distributed data management filled up DataStax’s list of top 5 use cases.

Hadoop is a big driver in the data world, and there’s a whole ecosystem , or rather ecosystems, developing around the open-source analytics engine.

Version 1.0 of Cassandra was released in 2011, as was version 1.0 of Riak. The latter is another NoSQL database that’s used by several big names throughout the web, and sponsor Basho offers a commercial version of the solution just like DataStax. Big clients include Amazon Web Services.