Cloudant Launches NoSQL Database-as-a-Service on Rackspace

Cloud-based database provider Cloudant has launched its NoSQL database-as-a-service on Rackspace Hosting‘s (NYSE: RAX) open cloud platform. The DBaaS for web and mobile applications is now available across the open cloud as part of the Rackspace Cloud Tools program.

Cloudant was formed by three MIT physicists and launched in 2008 as a company dedicated to solving the problems of managing and analyzing Big Data. Its NoSQL cloud service was, according to the company, built for scaling with data that is distributed and replicated across the vendor’s global data network.

With Rackspace, Cloudant has moved into a new realm, giving Rackspace developers and users access to the the DBaaS as an application data layer that scales up or down based on demand and usage through a “simple management interface.”

Cloudant isn’t the first database to be launched on Rackspace, of course. Rackspace markets its own brand of MySQL-based cloud databases under the Rackspace Cloud Databases brand, for instance. Based on the marketing of the Cloudant NoSQL DBaaS, this new offering on the Rackspace open cloud seems to be complementary to what Rackspace offers instead of a direct competitor, and according to Cloudant, the offering was launched in partnership with Rackspace.

“Cloudant customers deploy highly distributed, data-intensive, real-time applications, which is an ideal fit with Rackspace open cloud’s global reach and tremendous performance,” said Derek Schoettle, Cloudant CEO, in a prepared statement.

The focus here really seems to be on giving end users another choice on the Rackspace open cloud platform. In terms of technology, what Cloudant notes is of key importance is the Cloudant Data Layer, a collection of database clusters that are hosted and scaled across multiple Rackspace data centers. The goal is to provide customers with low latency and high availability data layer performance that pushes dynamic data distribution closer to the edge of the network.