It’s a big day for DataStax, Inc. as it takes center stage at the 2015 Cassandra Summit. The company, which is bidding to ramp up enterprise adoption of the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database it helps to develop, kicked off the day by announcing a new strategic partnership with cloud heavyweight Microsoft that brings its DataStax Enterprise platform to the Azure cloud.

Besides this, DataStax also rolled out a new version of its flagship DataStax Enterprise platform, together with the first production-ready release of Titan, a new high-performance, scale-out graph database built to manage “highly connected data”.

DataStax Enterprise on Azure

The biggest news is DataStax’s collaboration with Microsoft. The companies said DataStax Enterprise on Microsoft Azure is aimed at businesses which are looking to transition from on-premise to hybrid cloud environments. The platform is designed to enable developers to create, deploy and monitor enterprise-ready IoT, Web and mobile applications spanning public and private clouds.

One key feature DataStax Enterprise on Azure brings to the table is it allows Bring Your Own License (BYOL) DSE clusters to be launched in minutes directly from the Azure Marketplace using Azure Resource Management (ARM) Templates. The solution also facilitates easy hybrid deployments, allowing developers to move DES workloads across data centers, Azure and other service providers so they can build apps that leverage resources from all three. The solution also promises rapid scalability, allowing online applications to be quickly replicated across multiple data centers into cloud/hybrid enviroments. DataStax is also promising continuous availability thanks to DES’s peer-to-peer architecture which offers no single point of failure.

“As more organizations build their critical business applications in the cloud, DataStax has proved to be a natural Azure partner through its ability to enable enterprises to build solutions that can scale across thousands of servers,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft.

DataStax also said it’s joining Microsoft’s Enterprise Cloud Alliance, an initiative that aims to create and grow a strong partner ecosystem across a broad set of Enterprise Cloud Products for on-premise, hosted and Public Cloud environments.

DataStax Enterprise 4.8

As well as announcing its new partnership, DataStax also took the opportunity to unveil the latest version of its flagship DataStax Enterprise (DSE) product. DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 4.8 offers a number of enhancements that should please those who’re using it to run Web, mobile and IoT applications.

These include production certification for Spark 1.4; support for Spark job server to help manage and monitor Spark’s activities; a new ‘Live Indexing’ feature added to DSE’s search function that makes incoming data availabile faster; and the addition of ‘User Defined Type (UDT)’ support in DSE search, which reduces the coding effort for developers and allows for easy storage and search for various data formats. Finally, DataStax said it’s adding packaging and deployment ease-of-use improvements through support for the Docker container project.

Titan 1.0

Alongside DSE 4.8, DataStax also rolled out the first production-ready release of a new project its been developing. Titan Graph Database 1.0 is billed as a scale-out, high-performance graph database that’s designed to manage highly connected data. Matthias Broecheler, Director of Engineering at DataStax, explained that Titan was created to “scale and perform where other graph databases cannot,” with a special focus on handling the heaviest and most complex workloads.

Titan 1.0 comes with a number of new ehancements not seen in earlier builds, including support for TinkerPop and Gremlin 3.0 to enable OLTP and OLAP Gremlin query capabilities; Spark/Giraph and Hadoop support for OLAP operations; and support for Cassandra 2.2, HBase 1.x and Elasticsearch 1.5.

“DataStax is very excited about the enhancements in DSE 4.8 and its role in helping drive Titan 1.0 to completion,” said Robin Schumacher, Vice President of Products, DataStax. “We were privileged to spearhead over 85 percent of the work for Titan 1.0 and continue to be very committed to helping make the best NoSQL and graph database technology.”