Apache Cassandra distributor DataStax announced yesterday morning that it has raised $45 million in Series D funding from Scale Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, and Next World Capital. Existing backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital, and Meritech Capital Partners also participated in the round.

DataStax will use the new funding to scale worldwide operations and accelerate product development. The firm also plans to strengthen relations with the open-source Cassandra community, which plays a central role in driving enterprise adoption.

Jonathan Ellis, the founding CTO of DataStax and the chair of the Cassandra project, said in an interview on theCube that he and fellow contributors are determined to make the database more accessible for enterprise users. He highlighted that community support is a major selling point for traditional organizations, an assessment that Scale Venture Partners’ Andy Vitus wholeheartedly agrees with.

“DataStax is poised to disrupt the traditional RDBMS market and has already demonstrated significant momentum – signing an enviable list of enterprise customers, expanding into Europe, and unveiling innovative releases that make the product easier to adopt, deploy, and manage,” the investor wrote in a statement. “We look forward to working with the team to further accelerate their expansion as they address this large and growing market.”

The “innovative releases” Vitus mentioned refer to newly announced community and enterprise editions of DataStax’s flagship solution.

DataStax Community Edition (DSC) 2.0 features several new additions, including a lightweight compare and set mechanism that ensures users don’t overwrite each other’s work. It also supports “triggers” that facilitate the creation of event-driven database workflows, improved replication, and enhanced navigation.

DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 3.1 in turn introduces virtual nodes, parallel operations, and integration with the Apache Solr search server. The platform can handle up to 10 times more data per node than the previous release.

To hear the full interview with Jonathan Ellis from Cassandra Summit 2012, click on the video below.