The intensifying competition in the NoSQL world is driving Basho Technologies Inc. to move up the value chain with a new platform promising to provide a unified environment for storing and processing the growing amounts of unstructured data entering the corporate network. It’s the latest realization of the tried and true one-shop-stop approach to differentiation in the enterprise.

The most comparable previous example is Hewlett-Packard’s HAVEn, which combines its relational database and other analytic technologies with Hadoop to offer a similar integrated value proposition. The newly unveiled Basho Data Platform follows along the same lines, but substitutes the proprietary software with the best alternatives that the open-source ecosystem has to offer.

The centerpiece, of course, is the company’s flagship Riak key-value store. The platform uses the regular version, which has been renamed KV for the launch, to handle small files such as logs and documents while S2, formerly known as Riak CS, stores bigger objects such as virtual machine images that can’t easily be split up.

The most frequently used of that data is cached leveraging a built-in implementation of Redis that features automated clustering and data protection, functionality shared with the analytic component. Filling that role is Apache Spark, the in-memory processing engine for Hadoop that’s touted as being up to 100 times faster than the current default execution framework.

Basho claims that having its platform handle the management of the notoriously difficult technology can help organizations take advantage of its speed more easily, the same promise that it’s making for the integrated version of Solr included alongside Spark, which rounds out the bundle with text search capabilities. But performance is hardly the only motivation behind that specific choice of components.

The company has cited an internal survey saying that a full 42 percent of its customers are already taking advantage of Solr in their environments and another 50 percent are using Redis, at the expense of much manual work for the administrators tasked with keeping everything moving in tandem. The automation provided in the Basho Data Platform should make it especially attractive to that audience. The bundle is set to hit general availability in June.
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