The Big Data space saw a lot of action this week. Tableau held its first earnings call, CloudPhysics raised funding for its data-driven IT operations tool, and Nimbus pulled the curtains back on two new powerful flash systems. In other news, DARPA started studying the risk associated with the democratization of Big Data.

In its first quarter as a public cloud, Tableau reported sales of $49 million, up 71 percent from the same period last year. The company credited this massive increase to the more than 1,500 new customers it made in the past three months, a growth rate that is expected to accelerate in coming quarters.

CloudPhysics also announced good news this week: it closed a $10 million Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The startup said that the capital will be spent on beefing up its flagship solution, a management platform for virtualized environments that taps into the power of crowdsourcing to track system health.

According to CloudPhysics co-founder and CEO John Blumenthal, his firm’s solution is based on an ever-growing database that already holds over 20 trillion samples of configuration, performance, failure and event data. The solution leverages these records to make it easier for users to monitor, maintain and upgrade their environments.

CloudPhysics announced its latest funding round around the same time Nimbus Data Systems unveiled its fourth generation all-flash arrays. The new Gemini F400 and F600 models leverage 1x nanometer MLC flash to deliver two to five times the IOPS of competing offerings, which makes them ideal for data-intensive workloads such as Hadoop and OLTP.

While vendors are busy establishing themselves in the rapidly growing Big Data market, researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are studying the ways hackers could exploit information to launch sophisticated cyber attacks. DARPA recently started hiring researchers to assess the potential scope of such offensives.