DataStax announced the general availability of a new Zero-Downtime Cloud Migration tool that enables organizations to seamlessly migrate live data from self-managed Apache Cassandra instances to the company's fully managed serverless Cassandra offering, DataStax Astra, with no downtime.

A recent study by industry analyst firm GigaOm reveals that enterprises can save up to 76 percent in the three-year total cost of ownership (TCO) by using a serverless Cassandra offering instead of self-managed Cassandra clusters.

The highly scalable Apache Cassandra open source database is often used for workloads that need to deliver massive amounts of data to users around the world with extremely high reliability. As such, many Cassandra production applications are business critical, always on, and downtime is not an option. With DataStax's new migration tool, enterprises can easily migrate live production Cassandra or DataStax Enterprise workloads to the DataStax Astra database-as-a-service (DBaaS) to quickly and easily take advantage of the cost savings and other benefits of fully-managed, serverless Cassandra.

"The costs of using data are escalating, but there are many important strategies IT can adopt to mitigate these and create a sustainable path to long-term data innovation," said Ed Anuff, DataStax chief product officer. "The recent study by GigaOm highlights the cost savings that can be achieved by using a managed, serverless Cassandra database. With our new migration tool, we want to make it as painless as possible for every enterprise and developer to start taking advantage of Astra's pay-as-you-go pricing, multi-cloud flexibility and cloud-native agility."

DataStax Astra is the first and only open, multi-cloud serverless DBaaS. With Astra, enterprises only pay for the resources they consume (e.g., reads, writes, and storage), instead of having to size and pay for a database by predicting peak usage. Astra can speed up application development, streamline operations, and deliver TCO savings of up to 76 percent over non-serverless database workloads, according to the study by GigaOm.

"Our TCO study proves how valuable Astra can be for enterprises that are using Cassandra," said William McKnight, analyst at GigaOm. "Simply put, serverless Cassandra can significantly reduce the costs of Cassandra workloads because it's a fully managed hosted offering and there is no overspending for unused, idle capacity."

One of the first companies to use the DataStax's Zero-Downtime Migration tool was Liquid Analytics, which recently completed a migration from self-managed Cassandra to Astra. In short order, the company has already realized performance gains.

"DataStax Astra is faster than our previous system, and we've come to really love it," explains Vish Canaran, data science officer at Liquid Analytics. "By leveraging the migration tool, we successfully migrated live data to Astra, without any hiccups. Astra makes it much easier for us to develop highly scalable cloud-native applications using Cassandra."

The DataStax Zero-Downtime Migration tool is available for zero cost, and it comes with every DataStax Astra subscription. For more information on the fastest way to get up and running on Astra without any downtime, check this out.