It’s a good time to be a NoSQL database vendor. You don’t have to tell Matt Pfeil that. As the co-founder of DataStax, which brings Apache Cassandra to the enterprise, he’s living the story.

What started as an eight-person team in a rented office in San Mateo, Calif. in early 2011, DataStax now serves 500 customers in more than 55 countries and makes its home in a 36,000 square foot space.

And that’s not all. Pfeil and his co-founder Jonathan Ellis have raised $189.7 million in venture capital to grow their company. It’s now valued at more than $830 million.

But that’s not what the DataStax team was supercharged about when we spoke last week. Instead Pfeil had his company’s partnership with HP Moonshot on his mind. It was announced earlier today.

“In the past DataStax Enterprise hasn’t always worked well with smaller servers,” said Pfeil. “HP Moonshot changes that.”

Big Deal

By aligning the right amount of compute, memory, network bandwidth and storage for big data sized workloads, the DataStax, HP Moonshot combo provides enterprises with a database management solution designed to effortlessly handle massive amounts of data across many servers with predictable scalability and exceptional performance.

And this isn’t just vendor hype.

Chris King, vice president of operations at SpringCM, can testify to the fact.

“During a pretty typical weekday, we're taking in about 25K docs an hour.  The number we emphasize is this, though … we're executing 1 to 2 million workflow steps per hour,” he said.

He’s genuinely impressed by the performance and value proposition that the DataStax, HP Moonshot brought to SpringCM.

SpringCM, for those who aren’t familiar with it, does document-centric cloud workflow automation, with an emphasis on contracts in the Salesforce.com ecosystem. Its platform manages contracts, documents and all types of content, accelerating productivity for fast-moving organizations.

And how important is workflow and speed to SpringCM customers?

Considering that its workflow performance helps their customers get their deals closed faster by automating the biggest bottleneck in the sales cycle: the contract management process, it’s vital.

“The workflow metric is typically how we measure the system, because it is where the bulk of the platform architecture and hardware exists, where most of the value for our customers happens, and where most of the data is generated,” explained King.

The “big data” that SpringCM handles is primarily around metadata analytics. There’s a lot of data put into the system and a lot of data pulled through.

But that’s only part of the win, according to King. The DataStax, HP Moonshot combo is also a space, time, money and energy server.

New World Order

It may be worth pointing out that when it comes to managing and searching ever-growing amounts of data and metadata in an increasingly third platform world, new questions will need to be asked, new solutions will need to be considered and new gains might be made by the enterprises who consider new approaches and new tools.

SpringCM, for example, seems to have found wins all around via the DataStax HP combo.