Author Archives: Alex Gutow

Basho and Citrix Provide Update on CloudStack and Riak CS

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February 15, 2013

Basho and Citrix continue to collaborate on the integration of Apache CloudStack and Riak CS (Cloud Storage) to create a complete cloud software offering (see Basho joins Apache CloudStack Project).

On January 16, 2013, Citrix’s David Nalley and Basho’s John Burwell, detailed the underlying architecture and customer benefits of CloudStack and Basho’s Riak CS software. In the video, David Nalley provides an overview of CloudStack’s architecture and offers a walkthrough of CloudStack Administration, including provisioning of new instances and a description of the CloudStack API.

John Burwell, also a Committer to Apache CloudStack, explains the role of Secondary Storage software to store immutable assets (templates, ISO images, snapshots). John details the difference between Object Storage and Block Storage, discussing benefits such as flexible meta-data definition and custom API access. Finally, John describes enhancements in the upcoming 4.1.0 release that leverage Riak CS to synchronize assets in secondary storage across zones/data centers, reducing operational costs and complexity for multi-zone CloudStack implementations.

Basho is actively working with the CloudStack community to design CloudStack’s next generation architecture to drive deeper integration of leading edge storage technologies such as Riak CS.

Earlier this week, Basho and Datapipe announced the availability of a new object storage service on Datapipe’s 10 Gig Stratosphere Cloud Platform. The S3-compatible object storage service is built on Citrix CloudStack and fully integrates Riak CS.

Basho

Riak for Advertising Services and Platforms

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February 14, 2013

Advertisers need to provide highly available, low latency experiences to thousands of clients and partners and millions of users. They also need to serve large amounts of data all over the world and can experience significant traffic spikes. To meet these needs, more advertisers are considering distributed data solutions. This post looks at common use cases for Riak in the advertising space, and the stories of two existing advertising users. For a full technical overview, download our whitepaper on Riak for advertisers.

Top Use Cases for Riak in Advertising:

  • Serving Ad Content: Riak’s rapid storage and content agnosticism makes it ideal for storing ad content and handling influxes of ad traffic. For more information on serving ad content with Riak, check out our documentation.
  • Session Storage: This type of data is naturally a good fit for Riak’s key/value model. This data can also be encoded in many different ways and can evolve without any administrative changes to the schema. You can find more information on building a session store with Riak here.
  • Mobile: Riak is ideal for the low-latency, always-available small object storage needed to power mobile experiences across platforms.
  • Global Data Locality: Riak Enterprise’s multi-datacenter capabilities allow advertisers to maintain a global data footprint while providing an always-on, low-latency experience, anywhere in the world.

User Stories:
OpenX, the global leader in digital and mobile advertising technology, serves trillions of ads each year. They use Riak for handling user and trafficking data storage behind their data services API. Riak was selected due to its highly available, low-latency, redundant architecture. OpenX also uses Riak Enterprise’s multi-datacenter replication across several data centers. For more details about how OpenX uses Riak, check out the video of Anthony Molinaro, OpenX engineer, speaking at RICON2012, Basho’s 2012 developer conference.

Velti is a global marketing and advertising technology provider. Velti’s interactive subscriber services provide television broadcast audiences the ability to interact with programs using their mobile phone– voting on people or things, giving feedback, or participating in contests. They selected Riak because it is distributed, scalable, and highly available with the ability to handle large volumes of traffic. To minimize any potentially catastrophic outages, they also opted to build two geographically separated, mirrored sites using Riak Enterprise’s multi-datacenter replication feature. For more information on Velti’s use of Riak check out the complete case study.

To learn more about how advertisers can use Riak for their data needs, check out the complete overview, “Advertisers on Riak: A Technical Introduction,” or stay tuned for future blogs posts on data modeling and querying for advertising services built on Riak.

Basho

How Mobile App Bump Uses Riak for Data Storage

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February 13, 2013

Bump, one of the most popular mobile apps of all time, makes it easy for users to share their contact information, photos and other objects by simply “bumping” their smartphones. Bump uses Riak to store user data including events, communications sent and received, handset information and tokens needed to authenticate using social networks.

Bump chose Riak for its operational ease-of-use, ability to scale writes, and availability under failure conditions.

“It’s a relief that we don’t need to spend time thinking about whether or not Riak is working,” said Will Moss, Server Engineer at Bump. “It does what it’s supposed to do; nodes can go down but Riak will still work. It’s great to be able to deal with node failures the next day instead of at 3am.”

Recently, Bump expanded their mobile app offerings and launched Flock, a photo-sharing app. For more information on how Flock uses Riak, including their data model, watch Bump’s presentation at RICON2012, Basho’s 2012 developer conference. Bump is now running 25 nodes on Riak and storing around 3TB of data.

Building A Transaction Logs-based Protocol On Riak – Will Moss and Tim Douglas, RICON2012 from Basho Technologies on Vimeo.

You can also check out the complete case study.

Additionally, check out Bump’s website for more details about Bump and Flock and links to download the apps for iOS and Android. To get started with Riak, check out our overview.

Basho

OmniTI Uses Riak to Power Viggle’s Mobile App

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February 12, 2013

OmniTI is a provider of web infrastructures and applications for companies that require scalable, high-performance, mission critical solutions. They specialize in providing complex, high-transaction, and large-volume data applications. One of their customers is Viggle, a mobile app that rewards people for checking into the television shows they are watching. Viggle has more than a million users, and its advertisers include Pepsi, Kraft, and Capital One.

OmniTI designed the server architecture for Viggle’s mobile app and also designed the internal APIs that connect Viggle’s multiple back-end services, creating a cohesive, fault-tolerant system. OmniTI chose Riak as an integral part of this system, providing high availability and low latency during peak times.

“For this architecture, near-zero downtime and sustaining high throughput with low latency are critically important,” said Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of OmniTI. “We needed Viggle’s key components to remain available and responsible under sudden floods of user traffic, which made Riak the perfect fit. Riak has not disappointed us and has performed exactly as needed for this application.”

For more information on how Viggle has used OmniTI to design and support their system, check out their full announcement.

Basho

Datapipe and Riak Cloud Storage

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February 11, 2013

We are excited to announce Datapipe’s Stratosphere, a globally available, high-performance managed cloud computing platform, leverages Riak Cloud Storage (CS). Riak Cloud Storage provides Datapipe and its customers with highly available, low-latency and S3-compatible storage.

Sign up here to get started with Datapipe’s 10 Gig Stratosphere cloud platform and earn a $500 credit.

Datapipe offers a single provider solution for managing and securing mission critical IT services, including cloud computing, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, managed hosting, and colocation.

Stratosphere is Datapipe’s globally available managed cloud computing platform. With the launch of Riak CS to support cloud object storage, Datapipe customers can now access cloud object storage from any solution hosted with Datapipe and adjacent to existing solutions in any Datapipe data center. Stratosphere is designed for enterprise high I/O production environments and can also be used for development, testing and QA environments. Use cases include large-scale marketing campaigns, brand sites and analytics; applications with variable peak demand times and other dynamic workloads; and cloud disaster recovery and geographic redundancy.

Datapipe delivers services from the world’s most influential technical and financial markets including New York metro, Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Why Riak Cloud Storage at Datapipe?
Datapipe selected Riak Cloud Storage for its low-latency, highly available object storage, operational ease-of-use, and multi-site replication capabilities. After extensively testing solutions from a variety of vendors in the space, Datapipe selected Riak Cloud Storage for a few core reasons:

  • Built on years of developing Riak, Riak CS is designed to provide simple, available, distributed cloud storage at any scale.
  • Riak CS is compatible with major cloud object storage clients and applications with its S3-based API.
  • Riak CS meets the high performance requirements of the Stratosphere cloud-computing platform.

“Riak CS provides the high-performance, distributed datastore we need to deliver a sound foundation for our cloud storage needs now and for many years into the future,” said Ed Laczynski, VP Cloud Strategy, Datapipe.

Be on the lookout for upcoming documentation about using Riak CS-backed functionality on Stratosphere at Datapipe. Riak CS is now available with Datapipe in a limited beta, with an upcoming full release.

For a developer trial of Riak CS, sign up here.

Basho

Seven Riak Meetups Happening February 13th

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February 7, 2013

Basho and our community have a handful of events lined up for February 13th. We have official meetups/group hacks in at least seven cities in the US.

We hope to see you next week. If you can’t attend an official Meetup, throw a Riak hack or drink up in your city and email te@basho.com to tell us about it.

Thanks for being a part of Riak.

Basho

Boston/Cambridge

  • Speaker: Weston Jossey, Software Engineer, Tapjoy
  • Talk Title: Huge Data Migrations to Riak Made Easy(er)
  • Details and RSVP

Chicago

  • Speaker: Sean Cribbs, Software Engineer, Basho Technologies
  • Talk Title: The Deep Riak
  • Details and RSVP

New York City

  • Speaker: Aaron Brown, Lead Systems Engineer, ideeli
  • Talk Title: Riak at ideeli
  • Details and RSVP

Portland, OR

San Francisco

  • Speaker: Robert Zuber, Co-Founder, Copious
  • Talk Title: Riak in a Multi-Datastore Strategy at Copious
  • Details and RSVP

Silicon Valley

  • Speaker 1: Pavan Venkatesh, Technical Evangelist, Basho Technologies
  • Talk Title 1: From Relational to Riak
  • Speaker 2: Sajith Kizhakkiniyil, Software Infrastructure and Backend Architecture Support, Apollo Group
  • Talk Title 2: Riak at Apollo
  • Details and RSVP

Seattle

  • Speaker: Adron Hall and You
  • Talk Title: Nerd Lunch and The Start of Seattle Riak
  • Details and RSVP

Basho and Tokyo Electron Device (TED) Announce Strategic Partnership Distribution Agreement

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TED to Leverage Deep Relationships with Enterprise Companies to Accelerate Adoption of Riak Throughout Japan

CAMBRIDGE, MA and YOKOHAMA, JAPAN – February 7, 2013 – Basho Technologies, Inc. and Tokyo Electron Device Limited (TED) announced a strategic partnership and distribution agreement under which TED will resell Basho products throughout Japan and has become a strategic equity investor in Basho. Basho Technologies specializes in distributed systems technologies and is the creator of Riak, the industry leading distributed database and cloud storage software. TED provides world-class products and solutions that deliver competitive advantages to its customers. The strategic partnership enables Basho and TED to capitalize on the comprehensive resources of TED to open up new opportunities for Basho in the Japanese market. As part of the partnership, TED will build and maintain dedicated sales support and post-sales support resources specifically around Riak, Riak CS and future new products from Basho.

“Basho is very excited to enter into a long-term strategic partnership with TED,” said Sam Takagi, general manager of Basho Japan and Asia Pacific. “TED is highly regarded throughout Japan for its expertise in storage infrastructure, data backup and protection, and data warehouse design and operations. Riak’s strengths around high-availability, scalability and predictability are highly complementary to TED’s expertise and will provide an important new and innovative database and storage solution for TED’s customers. With Riak, Japanese businesses can meet demanding Internet, social and mobile requirements, as well as build highly-competitive public clouds and secure, high-performance private clouds.”

“Riak’s inherent distributed data capabilities offer a unique solution for companies building next generation applications, and cloud computing platforms that require high scalability, no downtime, and low cost operations,” said Vic Amano, VP & GM CN Business of Tokyo Electron Device Limited. “Our highly complementary expertise in data storage and our large and established network of commercial and industrial customers position us well to quickly speed adoption of Basho’s technology throughout Japan. The strategic nature of our partnership with Basho allows us to collaborate on future customer requirements and on product directions, allowing TED to maintain a competitive advantage for the next generation of database and storage technologies.”

“Through this strategic partnership, Basho is further building its global presence and particularly in the important and large market of Japan,” said Greg Collins, Basho’s president and CEO. “Our partnership with TED further underscores Basho’s commitment to the Japanese market. We are committed to building strong local capabilities and leveraging partnerships that have strong business networks and local-market expertise. TED is a terrific match for Basho. We look forward to working with TED and its customers for many years to come.”

Today’s announcement follows Basho’s recent opening of its Tokyo Office, officially launched on September 27, 2012.

About Tokyo Electron Device (TED) CN Business:

Tokyo Electron Device (TED) is a technical trading firm with a “trading business” function that provides semiconductor products and business solutions as well as a “development business” function that performs commissioned designing and the development of own-brand products. The Computer Network (CN) Business Section handles a wide range of storage systems, network-related equipment, and middleware products and provides them as part of its business solutions in the era of cloud computing. It has marketing functions in Japan and overseas to pick up on trends in the world’s advanced technologies ahead of others in order to offer products and services that cover processes that span everything from implementation to support.

For more information, visit: http://cn.teldevice.co.jp/english/.

About Basho Technologies

Basho Technologies is the leader in highly-available, distributed database technologies used to power scalable, data-intensive Web, mobile, and e-commerce applications and large cloud computing platforms. Basho customers, including fast-growing Internet-based businesses and large Fortune 500 enterprises, use the company’s flagship product, Riak, to deliver and manage digital media and unstructured data, implement multi-device user activity and sessions stores, to aggregate large amounts of data for logging, search and analytics, and to build scalable cloud storage platforms. The company is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and operates regional offices in London, San Francisco, Tokyo and Washington DC.

For more information visit http://www.basho.com or www.basho.co.jp.

Basho Technologies Medica Contact:
Bobby Patrick Chief Marketing Officer, Basho Technologies
Tel: 1-703-362-4811
Contact: bobby@basho.com

Tokyo Electron Device Media Contact:
Yoichiro Hotta, Yoko Fukui Corporate Communications Department, Tokyo Electron Device Limited
Tel: 81-45-443-4005
Contact form: https://www.teldevice.co.jp/eng/contact_form_news.html

Product Contact:
For inquiries regarding Basho Technologies and Riak Tokyo Electron Device Limited
Tsuyoshi Yoshi Tanaka, 1-510-624-3463
CN Business Contact form: http://cn.teldevice.co.jp/company/tea/form.html

Dr. Kenji Rikitake, IT and Computer Security Expert, Joins Basho

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February 6, 2013

Basho is excited to announce that Dr. Kenji Rikitake (jj1bdx at Twitter) has joined the company and will be based in Basho’s Tokyo Office. As a widely regarded industry expert on information security and computer networks, Kenji will be designing and guiding the evolution of the security model for Riak, Basho’s distributed database.

Kenji’s credentials are stellar. He was previously Professor of Institute of Information Management and Communication (IIMC) and Academic Centre for Computing and Media Studies (ACCMS) at Kyoto University (KU). He worked on KU campus information and network security management.

Kenji has worked on Erlang/OTP since 2008, including implementations of pseudo random number generators based on an industry standard Mersenne Twister. He also served as the General Chair of the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop.

Kenji has a Master of Information Engineering from University of Tokyo, and a PhD of Information Science and Technology from Osaka University. He is a senior member of ACM and IEICE.

Kenji has contributed to significant academic research surrounding distributed systems, application security, and network security. His academic papers and technical publications can be found at: http://www.k2r.org/kenji/papers/.

Also, we encourage you to check out Kenji’s recent video on IPv6 programming for Erlang/OTP at http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/SFBay2012/speakers/kenjirikitake.

We are excited to have Dr. Kenji Rikitake join the Basho team.

Basho

Basho and Riak at Rubyfuza

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February 4, 2013

Basho is proud be to be sponsoring Rubyfuza, happening this week in Cape Town, South Africa. We’ve sponsored and spoke at a few events in Cape Town over the past several years, and Riak has seen successful adoption among various South Africa-based companies like Praekelt and Mad Mimi. We’re happy to support the tech community in and around “The Tavern of the Seas.”

Sadly, as was the case with PyConZA, we won’t be able to send an official Basho envoy to be a part of it. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Jeremy Thurgood, a member of the Praekelt engineering team, will be there on our behalf as the Riak Ambassador.

Jeremy and his team have been using Riak in production for various projects, and have contributed some useful code to the community along the way. Though Python is his language of choice, he’s been brushing up on his Ruby and will be on-hand to answer any Riak questions that attendees might have. There will also be some Basho and Riak swag floating around to make sure that no one goes home empty-handed.

Enjoy Rubyfuza and make sure to say his to Jeremy if you have a moment. Also, if you’re attending a conference and want to serve as an extension of the Basho Team as a Riak Ambassador, shoot an email to te@basho.com. We want to talk to you.

Mark

Yokozuna Pre-release 0.3.0 Now Available

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February 4, 2013

Today I’m happy to announce the 3rd pre-release of Yokozuna. It’s light on new features but has some good performance improvements and added robustness. Here are the highlights:

  • Allow store/retrieval of schemas via HTTP.
  • Upgrade to Solr 4.1.0 and the latest Riak.
  • Improve write/index throughput by disabling Solr’s “realtime get” and switching from XML update to JSON.
  • Added robustness around AAE and default index creation.
  • Listen on ‘solr//select’ to more easily work with existing clients out of the box.

To see all changes read the full release notes. Like the last two releases, an AMI has been made, see the EC2 doc for more info.

New for this release is the addition of a source package. I hope this might encourage those who are scared off by the process of building from git to give Riak/Yokozuna a try. These four steps below will produce a ready-to-run node under ‘rel/riak’.

wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/yzami/pkgs/src/riak-yokozuna-0.3.0-src.tar.gz
tar zxvf riak-yokozuna-0.3.0-src.tar.gz
cd riak-yokozuna-0.3.0-src
make stage

Ryan Zezeski