SAN MATEO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 12/18/12 -- DataStax, the company that powers the apps that transform business, has unveiled a brand new version of Planet Cassandra, the first exclusive destination for all things Apache Cassandra (C*). A free service, Planet Cassandra combines Cassandra knowledge, expertise and education under one roof, enabling community members to deepen their knowledge, network, share and promote themselves.

"The C* community's household names of tomorrow will be born at Planet Cassandra," said Matt Pfeil, vice president of Customer Solutions at DataStax. "We're pleased to be the custodians of such a powerful and important site, finally integrating all Cassandra knowledge and the community in a single place. We're confident that Planet Cassandra will fast become the ultimate knowledge and education destination for the Cassandra community."

"Community involvement is so important to advance any open-source technology, and it has been fantastic to see the Cassandra community form and expand over the last four years," said Jonathan Ellis, CTO and co-founder at DataStax. "One of the challenges has been centralizing all the great things that the community has been up to, so that people wanting to learn about C* have an easy destination. Planet Cassandra recognizes and fills that need."

A valuable resource for open-source application developers, database developers, architects and other members of the Cassandra community, Planet Cassandra will feature:

• Extensive educational resources, including webinars, tutorials, videos, podcasts and Stackoverflow questions
• Free downloads of Cassandra, drivers and related utilities
• Events listings and a calendar that make it easy to find local Cassandra meetups and share content
• User resources that enable the promotion of MVPs, speakers, bloggers and companies using C*
• A dedicated blog, syndicating content from top C* authors from all over the web

"The diversity of the authors and the variety of topics in the new Planet Cassandra shows you how fast Cassandra is growing both in terms of features and user adoption," said Ed Capriolo, a DataStax MVP and Hadoop systems administrator at m6d.com. "Just as Apache Cassandra brings together many nodes to form a massively scalable distributed database, Planet Cassandra brings together content from around the Web into one massively awesome site. DataStax is going with a peer-to-peer architecture to work with its community, not a master-slave one."

In addition to powering apps for more than 200 enterprise customers, from startup Fortune 100 clients, DataStax plays a prominent role in the Cassandra community. The DataStax MVP program recognizes key individuals who have gone above and beyond to share their knowledge and expertise with the rest of the Cassandra community. Planet Cassandra will complement those offerings by providing an industry-leading community resource.

To learn more about Planet Cassandra, please visit http://planetcassandra.org/.

About DataStax

DataStax powers the apps that transform business for more than 200 customers, including startups and 16 of the Fortune 100. DataStax delivers a massively scalable, flexible and continuously available big data platform built on Apache Cassandra™. DataStax integrates enterprise-ready Cassandra, Apache Hadoop™ for analytics and Apache Solr™ for search across multi-datacenters and in the cloud.

Companies such as Adobe, Healthcare Anytime, eBay and Netflix rely on DataStax to transform their businesses. Based in San Mateo, Calif., DataStax is backed by industry-leading investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital and Meritech Capital Partners. For more information, visit DataStax or follow us @DataStax.