Cassandra is a NoSQL database management solution that spawned out of Facebook’s internal IT a couple years ago, and has built up a lot of momentum ever since. Last month theCube attended the Cassandra Summit, and Wikibon’s Jeff Kelly wrote up an overview about the state of the project with some of his observations from the gathering.

The majority of the companies that were represented at the Santa Clara conference already made it through the planning stage, and the professionals present cited the improvements that they’ve realized by deploying the open-source solution.

While complexity is a challenge, Cassandra compensates for it with two main advantages over other solutions: real-time performance and high data accessibility, plus the capability to deploy across multiple geographic locations.  By not confining an environment to one data center, Cassandra facilities increased availability and added data protection.

The report’s conclusion:

“Cassandra has proven itself in numerous mission-critical, production scenarios and continues to improve in performance, scalability and management thanks to contributions from the community and commercial sponsors like DataStax. Further, enterprises that are also interested in expanding their Big Data capabilities to include batch analytics may be well served by DataStax’s three-pronged Big Data approach – bundling Cassandra, Hadoop and Solr in one platform.”

DataStax CTO John Ellis stopped by theCube during the Cassandra Summit and shared some of his insight into the ecosystem. He says that ease of use is going to be big priority going forward, as well as scalability.

The next version of Cassandra is rolling out in October, and while v1.2 doesn’t fully address those points it does introduce some powerful new features. Among these is the option for JBOD deployment and better support for concurrent users on the admin side – one of the factor in large-scale environments.