DataStax today announced DataStax Luna, subscription-based support for open source Cassandra. The new DataStax offering supports the fast growing adoption of Apache Cassandra by enterprises across every industry. According to the popular site DB-Engines, Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100 and continues to gain popularity. 

DataStax is the logical choice to offer this service with over 10 years working on the world's largest Cassandra implementations and hundreds of customers running mission-critical Cassandra apps, as the largest contributor to open source Cassandra, and pioneering advances that extend the power of Cassandra for the unique needs of the enterprise.

"Cassandra is an essential piece of our technology stack that collects critical sensor data as part of our oceanographic research, and we are excited about DataStax Luna to support this effort," said Jeffrey Glatstein, Senior Manager of Cyberinfrastructure at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "Luna will give us access to the best Cassandra expertise so we can be more successful with open source Cassandra in our production environments."

"We have a large number of Cassandra nodes running a variety of applications critical to our business," said Rune Birkemose Jakobsen, Senior Development Manager at MobilePay. "Some are DataStax and others are open source. We welcome DataStax support and expertise across all our Cassandra deployments and are excited about today's new service."

"Enterprises and developers tell us that they want the power and flexibility of Cassandra for a wide range of use cases, from business optimization to consumer apps," said Jonathan Ellis, co-founder and CTO of DataStax. "They want Cassandra to be easier to use, backed by experts, and available in a range of options depending on their business and application needs."

DataStax Luna addresses these needs and is available today via a self-service website. Both Basic and Enterprise tiers include: a yearly subscription, and free Cassandra education with access to community forums, events and more.

Organizations are finding that running open source projects for important applications without professional support is a significant risk. Research and advisory firm Gartner recommends that "data and analytics leaders concerned with modernizing their data management solutions and strategy should: model all costs - including development and maintenance, data and application movement, training, parallel operations, and licensing. Always purchase commercial support for production implementations," in the report State of the Open-Source DBMS Market, 2019

As part of its ongoing support of the Cassandra community, DataStax today also delivered two new free tools to use with DataStax Enterprise and open source Cassandra: DataStax Apache Kafka Connector and Bulk Loader to make loading and unloading data faster and easier.