Basho Technologies
| Company type | Private company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Distributed Systems, NoSQL, Cloud storage software |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Headquarters | |
Key people | Chester Davenport (Chairman), Adam Wray (CEO), Dave McCrory (CTO), Amy Pelly (CFO), Antony Falco (Founder), Earl Galleher (Founder), Andy Gross (Riak Author), Justin Sheehy (Riak Author, Founder) |
| Products | Riak, Riak KV, Riak KV Enterprise, Riak TS |
| Website | www.basho.com |
Basho Technologies was a firm specializing in distributed systems, known primarily for creating the key-value NoSQL database Riak along with Riak CS, an object storage solution constructed atop the Riak framework.
Technology and products
The company engineered Riak, an open source distributed database tailored for high availability, fault tolerance, scalability, and straightforward operation. Its commercial edition, Riak Enterprise, provided enhanced multi-data center replication capabilities alongside enterprise-grade support services.
Riak manages unstructured data by storing it as objects within buckets that can be queried. It is designed to scale efficiently by spreading data across server clusters and seamlessly incorporating additional nodes while preserving system availability. Developed in Erlang, Riak leverages the language’s inherent distribution features, robustness against faults, and effortless hardware scaling.
Following Basho’s shutdown, its intellectual property was acquired by Bet365, which subsequently made previously proprietary components like riak_repl (enabling multi-data-center replication) available as open source on GitHub.
Additionally, Basho provided Riak Cloud Storage (CS), an open source multi-tenant cloud storage database built upon the Riak platform. This solution integrated with both private cloud environments and public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). Enterprises utilized it to support internal private clouds, while startups adopted its Amazon-compatible API for their own offerings. Key features of Riak CS included support for large objects, an S3-compatible API and authentication system, multi-tenancy with user-specific reporting tools, scalable capacity management, and a graphical monitoring dashboard.
Releases and updates
The release of Riak 1.0 in September 2011 introduced features such as secondary indexes, Riak Pipe, integration with Riak Search, the Lager logging framework, and support for LevelDB. Early 2012 saw the launch of Riak 1.1 which brought improvements to Riak Core including a new ownership claim algorithm as well as enhancements to Riak KV and its MapReduce functionality. In August 2012, version 1.2 introduced SSL encryption, better balancing mechanisms, and refined control over replication across data centers in the Enterprise edition.
In March 2013, Basho open-sourced portions of Riak CS and released a commercial version named Riak CS Enterprise that featured multi-datacenter replication capabilities, monitoring utilities, and round-the-clock support. Version 1.4 of Riak added PN-Counters—distributed data types capable of handling increments and decrements across clusters—employing a compact binary format to reduce storage demands. Concurrently, Riak CS 1.4 improved interoperability with OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) and Ceph, enhancing scalability.
Riak 2.0 launched in September 2014 with new data types, tunable consistency settings, and integration of search functionality via Apache Solr. The April 2015 update to version 2.1 emphasized faster write operations, overall performance improvements, and simplified usability for developers and system administrators alike.
History
Basho Technologies was established in January 2008 by Earl Galleher, who previously served as EVP at Akamai Technologies, alongside Antony Falco, former VP of product management and technical services at Akamai.
In 2011, Donald J. Rippert, a veteran CTO from Accenture, joined Basho as president and CEO. At the same time, Bobby Patrick, with prior experience as CMO at GXS and Digex, assumed the role of CMO. Rippert departed in late 2012, and Gregory Collins was appointed as his successor in the CEO position. That year also saw Basho introduce RICON, a dedicated two-day conference focusing on distributed systems for developers.
March 2014 marked another leadership transition when Collins resigned and Adam Wray, formerly CEO of Tier 3, took over as CEO. Concurrently, original CTO and Riak co-creator Justin Sheehy and Chief Architect Andy Gross exited the company. Dave McCrory, previously SVP of engineering at Warner Music Group and known for developing the data gravity concept, was named CTO.
Basho gained industry recognition by being featured in the DBTA 100 list and CRN Magazine's Big Data 100 for its advancements in data management technology.
In 2017, the company entered receivership.
External links
- GigaOM: Basho arms would-be Amazon killers with AWS-compatible storage
- TechCrunch: Basho's Amazon S3 Compatibility Boosted with Replication for Riak Cloud Storage
- The Register: Basho Changes
- 451 Research: Basho takes Riak cloud storage platform open source
- 451 Research: Basho previews distributed database update after major NHS deal
- Official website
- NoSQL
- Cloud computing providers
- Software companies based in Washington (state)
- Cloud infrastructure
- Defunct software companies of the United States
- 2008 establishments in the United States
- 2008 establishments in Washington (state)
- Software companies established in 2008
- Software companies disestablished in 2017
- 2017 disestablishments in Washington (state)