MapR Technologies, a provider of distribution for Apache Hadoop, has scored a $20 million round of venture funding led by Redpoint Ventures.
Others participating in the round were existing investors LightSpeed Venture Partners and NEA.
Founded in 2009 and based in San Jose, Calif., MapR offers both a free and a subscription version of its distribution software designed to make Hadoop run more safely and efficiently for enterprises.
Will the real Hadoop company please stand up
Hadoop, part of the Apache Software Foundation, isopen sourcesoftware that allows enterprises to take advantage of "big data" by creating a framework for the storage of data clusters on inexpensive servers. Hadoop employs a parallel processing technique that can divide an application into fragments able to run "on any node in the cluster," according to MapR.
(Fun Fact: Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting, who named it after his son's toy elephant. Cutting is now chairman of the Apache Software Foundation and architect at enterprise software company Cloudera.)
Hadoop was begun at Yahoo, which deploys the software to store and analyze data. Other major users are Google and Facebook.
MapR's M3 and M5 Editions essentially augment Hadoop to make it enterprise ready for customers who lack the vast resources of a Google, Facebook or Yahoo. MapR says its Hadoop frameworks offer "full data protection, no single points of failure, improved performance, and dramatic ease of use advantages."
Among the features offered by MapR software are: enabling of real-time data flows, the ability to create an unlimited number of files, and synchronizing data across clusters via mirroring.
In astatementaccompanying the funding announcement, MapR chief executive John Schroeder said, "Our breakthroughs will grow and advance the entire Hadoop market. We have a deep pipeline of innovations."