Citrusleaf, a new database technology company, has officially launched and announced Citrusleaf 2.0, which the company describes as a different type of NoSQL database that combines the best practices of both database and distributed technology.
Simultaneously with the product launch, the company, which was founded in 2009 by Brian Bulkowski, CEO, and Srini Srinivasan, CTO, also announced Series-A funding from Alsop Louie Partners, Kalpathi Investments and Draper Associates. The funding will be used to enhance products, expand the team, and support growing vertical market customers in the advertising, financial, government and healthcare sectors.
Citrusleaf says the product solves a problem that challenges the most data-intensive, mission-critical businesses which is how to optimally store and access schema free data with linear scalability, high throughput and reliability. The most common deployments for Citrusleaf 2.0 are terabytes of data, billions of objects, and 200K-plus transactions per second per node, with sub-millisecond latency, the company says.
According to the company, Citrusleaf is easy to use and deploy, and comes with full support from the team that wrote it; is optimized for commodity hardware, and provides flexible data storage choices; and is also highly available with little to no downtime and requires low maintenance. The product is offered at a month-to-month pricing model based on data usage per data center.
"Where we sit today is squarely in the scalable real-time key-value store — so we are primarily a key-value store, however, key-value is just one form of indexing," says Bulkowski. "Our data type is actually document-oriented so we support rows and typed column values."
Bulkowski says the company's strategy is to go first after key-value "because it is the fast path into the scalable database and with that interface we are having success within certain key verticals" such as advertising. "But that is not where we are going to end up. We are not a key-value database inherently. We have a database engine which is ACID-compliant, which is fully scalable, fully distributed, and we will be building features out over the coming months and coming years to reach more and more of the overall database market so we will eventually I am sure do relational. We see relational and SQL as the interface that is right for a scalable solution."
In addition, says Bulkowski, "Our ability to do scalable graph is a part of our roadmap and part of what we can do technically. That is what I guess I would say is different about us — the ability to provide the scalability of the new NoSQL paradigms; but also we are bringing in the old technology, the ability to do ACID-compliant transactions — very small ones that is one of the keys to providing scalability — and then being able to reach out to more parts of the database market in the future."
Citrusleaf 2.0 has patents pending and is currently in production use, supporting user data storage solutions for real-time bidding for digital advertising. The company recently announced that AppNexus, a real-time ad platform for ad networks, demand-side platforms (DSPs) and other online advertising companies, has run Citrusleaf 2.0 in production for the last 8 months.