Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Brian Bulkowski and Srini Srinivasan, Co-founders of Aerospike (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the Bangalore team?

Srini Srinivasan: We have about 25 people.

SM: Did you lose people in Bangalore?

SS: We have been very fortunate to have very little attrition. Part of it is because of the people we attract wanting to work in cutting-edge technologies. You don’t give these kinds of jobs very much, even in the Valley. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Brian Bulkowski and Srini Srinivasan, Co-founders of Aerospike (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That is interesting. The reason I ask you about Facebook is because we are using Facebook content marketing. It is very well done. You just press one button and tell them “$10 of advertising, $70 of advertising,” and it will go advertising your content to the fans of your Facebook page – the friends and fans. Every time I do that I say: “Give me a little more control over this.” I want to be able to target by geography, for example. I like doing this. I love it and it is working great, but please give me a bit more control so that I can target it a bit better. That system could go much further technically.

Srini Srinivasan: Yes, and that is the system our customers have built on top of our software. So, yes, Facebook could benefit from this. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Brian Bulkowski and Srini Srinivasan, Co-founders of Aerospike (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have to do anything with your software to optimize it for a DRAM-oriented system versus a flash-oriented system?

Srini Srinivasan: We have optimizations to use a flash system. We also have optimizations for DRAM systems, but they are simpler. We wrote our own file system to take advantage of flash storage. We use it as a raw device. Then we use our Aerospike file system implementation. This essentially gets you a 100x [faster] performance over traditional systems. We are able to take advantage of the speed at which you can read and write Flash, and we do large block writes. We are also able to read directly from Flash so you can get a main memory like performance while still using flash. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Brian Bulkowski and Srini Srinivasan, Co-founders of Aerospike (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How is this all handled? You said Aerospike cluster, does that mean you deliver your service on the cloud?

Srini Srinivasan: We build software and we license our software to our customers. They put it on their hardware and run it. However, the software is self-managing. It is very easy to set up, and it is extremely efficient to manage operationally. We have about three dozen active mission-critical deployments worldwide across 50 to 60 data centers and across many clusters. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Brian Bulkowski and Srini Srinivasan, Co-founders of Aerospike (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Real-time is one issue, and the ability to distribute the data between Flash and the hard disk effectively [is another].

Srini Srinivasan: It is actually Flash and main memory. We have a hybrid system based on DRAM and flash. We can also work with rotational disk, but this is old technology. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Brian Bulkowski and Srini Srinivasan, Co-founders of Aerospike (Part 1)

Brian Bulkowski and Srini Srinivasan are co-founders of Aerospike, a real-time NoSQL database. Brian and Srini have more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry, having worked for companies like IBM, VerdiSoft, Copernicus, and iControl Networks. In this interview they talk about Aerospike’s real-time software solution and how it is unique, and discuss possibilities for entrepreneurs to fill gaps in this space building on top of their platform.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some background on you as well as the company. Tell us what you do, what problem you solve, and who the customers are. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with K.R. Sanjiv, SVP Analytics and Information Management Services, Wipro (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: And that is already exhausting the pool in Calcutta?

K. R. Sanjiv: Yes, it is getting stretched. Calcutta is a place with a lot of statistical institutes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with K.R. Sanjiv, SVP Analytics and Information Management Services, Wipro (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else you would like to comment on in that domain?

K. R. Sanjiv: As far as B2B companies are concerned, I think it is not so much of a fantasy. The potential they have today in terms of white spaces within their business processes is phenomenal. There are a few things I see and that customers have realized. >>>