V1 of Data Platform by UK Start-Up Acunu

Acunu Ltd. released version 1 of the Acunu Data Platform, a reinvention of the storage stack in more than 20 years. The platform and its open-source core was showcased at the GigaOM Structure Conference in San Francisco.

The Acunu Data Platform takes advantage of the dual evolutions enabling big data applications: The rise of non-relational or NOSQL databases such as Cassandra and analytical platforms such as Hadoop, and the performance increases of commodity hardware on which these databases run.

Acunu developed its platform from the ground up to leverage developments such as distributed servers in the cloud and the huge throughput increases enabled by SSDs.

"New technologies have given us tremendous potential for handling big data," says Tim Moreton, Acunu’s CEO. "But up until now, the storage stack that allows applications to communicate with hardware has been stuck in the 90s. Acunu is a Linux kernel module that enables you to make much better use of the commodity hardware you already have."

What it isn’t, what it is, what it does
Unlike others in the big data market, Acunu is not simply building tools or supporting existing open-source platforms. The company is completely reengineering the storage platform for use with a variety of data platforms. This release supports Cassandra and an S3-compatible store, and Acunu is porting Voldemort and memcached.

Additional data platforms will be supported in future releases.

Acunu delivers performance and more predictable behavior than Apache Cassandra on the same commodity hardware.

Advantages of using Acunu include:

• Eliminates garbage collection delays and increases throughput by up to 50X compared to vanilla Cassandra.
• Provides algorithms that increase performance without requiring the tuning needed with Cassandra.
• Operates in the Linux kernel, rather than Java, eliminating the need to tune the Java garbage collector.
• Simplifies management and monitoring across the cluster by operating through a single web-based user interface.
• Provides one-click snapshots and clones at scale, enabling new code to be tried out across the full dataset rather than through sample code. This increases development speed and reduces the risks of putting new code into production.

Put to the test by hit TV show
A beta program involving more than 30 organizations preceded this release of the Acunu platform. One of those organizations is Live Talkback, which developed the Buzz Off game for Britain’s Got Talent, Simon Cowell’s TV show watched by more than 10-million viewers a week. The web application enables viewers to vote in real time to ‘buzz off’ acts they don’t like.

"The volume of peak traffic handled by the Buzz Off application for ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ is the equivalent of 130 billion requests a month, which would make it a global top-10 website," says Malcolm Box, CTO of Live Talkback. "We think Acunu software has a unique approach that will enable us to dramatically increase throughput, reduce time spent tuning, and integrate easily with other tools."

The Acunu Data Core is open source under the GPLv2. The rest of the Acunu Data Platform will be offered at a range of support and pricing levels, beginning with Acunu Standard Edition, available free of charge.