DataStax Enterprise 6.8: Advanced cloud-native data and bare-metal performance

DataStax announced the general availability of DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 6.8. DSE 6.8 adds new capabilities for enterprises to advance bare-metal performance, support more workloads, and enhance developer and operator experiences with Kubernetes.

Built on the foundation of Apache Cassandra, DSE is the scale-out data infrastructure for enterprises that need to handle any workload on-premises and in any cloud on a continuously available, active-everywhere data platform.

“DataStax Enterprise 6.8 has made significant advancements in performance, ops management, and Cassandra workloads, but most importantly it adds a Kubernetes operator. This will help enterprises succeed with mission-critical, cloud-native deployments irrespective of the scale, infrastructure, or data model requirements,” said Ed Anuff, Chief Product Officer at DataStax.

“DataStax Enterprise has been hardened by hundreds of enterprises over the last decade and 6.8 will prove why it continues to be the scale-out NoSQL database of choice.”

New features in DSE 6.8 include:

• Kubernetes operator – Following last week’s open-source Kubernetes operator release, DSE 6.8 enables data sharing between containers for data managed with DSE. Enterprises can now benefit from a robust integration of a Management API and Kubernetes tooling that experienced operators rely on. Users can start, stop, recover, scale, and back up DSE nodes through Kubernetes, simplifying cloud-native application development and deployment.
• Faster scale-out – With DSE 6.8, there’s a new optimization feature aimed at significantly reducing the amount of time it takes Cassandra to scale-out during peak periods of demand or perform business continuity tasks. This optimization feature is called Zero Copy Streaming. Node addition, removal, and recovery is now up to 4x faster.
• Graph engine – With DSE 6.8, graph data models are now implemented as native Cassandra data models, with up to a 10x performance improvement. Users can now write to Cassandra and query it in real-time using the Gremlin traversal language. Developers can now build multi-model applications with joins, matching, and traversals over large distributed Cassandra data sets through graph queries.

In addition to these features, DSE 6.8 also includes improvements to NodeSync, which accelerates validation of new data; Guardrails, which enables automated protection of clusters through enforcement of best practices (e.g., table number and column size limits); DataStax Desktop, a cross-platform container-based tool that allows quick exploration of DSE 6.8 in a development environment and provisioning of the DSE 6.8 stack in minutes; and with the trusted security and data protection features enterprises rely on.