Big Data News: RainStorRaises $12M, Trifacta Launches

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the Big Data sector:

RainStor secures $12 million. Database provider RainStor announced it has raised $12 million in Series C funding from leading global financial services organization, Credit Suisse and Rogers Venture Partners. Existing investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, Storm Ventures and The Dow Chemical Company also participated in the round. The funds will help accelerate engineering, expand sales and marketing to maintain Big Data market leadership serving financial services, government, communications and other sectors driving the Big Data wave. Adopted by over 100 global companies, the RainStor database provides patented industry leading compression that enables the enterprise to manage and analyze petabyte scale at the lowest total cost. Customers can flexibly deploy RainStor across a variety of low cost scalable hardware platforms including SAN, NAS, CAS in addition to Cloud and operates natively on Apache Hadoop.  “We are very excited about this new investment which will not only help speed our growth in the Big Data market but is tremendous validation from the financial services and communications companies which we have been serving for a number of years.  Banks and communications operators have been living with Big Data for a long time and they absolutely require an enterprise-grade, standards based database that will allow them to scale and grow their information centric businesses at an acceptable cost,” commented John Bantleman, RainStor’s CEO.

Trifacta launched as big data startup.  VentureBeat reports that Trifacta came out of stealth mode Thursday as a big data startup, and has raised $4.3 million from Accel Partners’ Big Data Fund.  With the goal of democratizing data analysis, the UC Berkeley and Stanford computer scientists that started Trifacta think that data can become more useful when it is delivered in an easily understood form, such as visually. “Analysts today can get their hands on lots of data, and they have a range of powerful tools for visualization, statistics and business intelligence,” said Jeffrey Heer, a professor in Stanford’s Human-Computer Interaction research group. “But they often get stuck in the middle, trying to wrangle data into forms that suit their analysis tools. While each year we teach hundreds of students how to do this, the talent gap is in the tens to hundreds of thousands. At Trifacta we are building a scalable solution to making data manipulation approachable and efficient.”

Solera Networks enhances DeepSee Virtual Appliance. Solera Networks , announced major enhancements to its patented DeepSee Virtual Appliance that provides complete visibility of network traffic—including traffic between applications running in the virtual network. With its recent enhancements, the DeepSee Virtual Appliance now supports VMware ESX servers, Citrix XenServer, and Windows Hyper-V Virtual and KVM environments. With five times the visibility, the DeepSee appliance can capture, classify and reconstruct up to 10 terabytes of packets, sessions and files per virtual instance with clustering capabilities into the petabyte range – thereby supporting even the largest data center virtualization deployments and initiatives. "Organizations are under increased pressure from advanced persistent threats and targeted attacks requiring constant vigilance. While traditional preventative security technologies are essential, they don’t provide the visibility and context needed to assess and take action against these types of threats,” said Steve Shillingford, President and CEO, Solera Networks. “Customers across industries—including financial, infrastructure service providers, healthcare, defense and more—have deployed our DeepSee Virtual Appliance to gain complete insight and evidence of advanced malware and zero-day attacks targeting their networks and cloud deployments.