Couchbase, the startup behind the open source database of the same name, released a new version of its commercial offering that better addresses the availability requirements of mission-critical workloads. The announcement comes less than six months after the company raised $25 million in Series D funding from Adams Street Partners and existing investors to drive NoSQL into the enterprise.

Couchbase is a document database that can handle structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information at the same time while providing superior performance at a lower cost than traditional alternatives, according to its creators. Couchbase co-founder and chief mobile architect J. Chris Anderson told SiliconANGLE that the platform also allows for greater scalability, enabling users to drive operational efficiencies at large scale.

“The neat thing about Couch is that it’s not where it stops,” the executive detailed. “If there’s a normal technology like MySQL, filled with this data, you’re gonna give copies of it to people and that becomes its own whole problem. Wheres Couch is designed to federate data and allow you to shuffle it around to various servers.” While not quite as popular as MongoDB, Couchbase is used by thousands of developers and more than 350 organizations including Starbucks, Zynga and other household names.

Couchbase Server 2.5 Enterprise Edition introduces two new features designed to provide more reliability while simplifying administration. The first addition is zone awareness, which ensures data availability if an entire entire rack goes down. The other is a cross-data center replication capability that enables communications between geographically dispersed facilities without requiring a virtual private network. Eliminating this extra layer of complexity not only frees up person-hours but also reduces latency, a top priority for the web-scale companies Couchbase is targeting.

Image source Couchbase