The past week was a big one for several emerging players in the big data space, most notably Zettaset.

The startup closed raised $10 million in a second round of funding led by HighBar Partners. Broadcom also participated in the round, along with existing investors DFJ and Epic Ventures.

Zettaset earned the industry’s attention by creating a solution that makes it much easier – and considerably cheaper – to manage Hadoop deployments alongside existing mission-critical systems. The company’s tool automates the configuration process as well as day-to-day administration.

Zettaset supports all the major commercial distributions of Hadoop, a list dominated by only three vendors: Cloudera, HortonWorks, and MapR. The latter recently opened an EMEA headquarters in London and disclosed future plans for the region.

Steve Jenkins, the head of MapR’s UK branch, disclosed in an interview that his company chose to expand to the other side of the Pacific for a very strategic reason: many of the analytics firm’s clients are based in Europe, but don’t benefit from the same quality of service as U.S. users. Jenkins was brought aboard to improve customer support, and establish relations with local resellers and system integrators that can extended the value proposition with their own offerings.

Aerospike, an up-and-coming provider of NoSQL solutions, also made a big announcement last week. The company released the results of a benchmark that concludes its flagship product is up to ten times faster than the nearest competitor, Apache Cassandra.  Aerospike credits its comfortable lead over the market to the fact that its software is optimized to exploit SSDs, a feature that not many peers have bothered including in their solutions. That, however, is bound to change, especially now that someone demonstrated it is worth the R&D investment.