Database vendor DataStax has started offering commercial support for open source project Apache Cassandra and released some free tools to signal its dedication to the software.

The new addition to the company’s product portfolio is called DataStax Luna and comes in two flavours. Basic support contains help during the standard working week (8×5) and up to ten support tickets per year and cluster. It is mainly marketed to companies who want “support for development and staging clusters”. 

The enterprise version meanwhile offers round-the-clock technical support with unlimited support tickets, which is mainly of interest to those running production workloads on Cassandra. Companies with needs beyond that are asked to get in touch for custom plans. Basic as well as enterprise packages come with “free Cassandra education” without any specifics as to what that might entail, and “access to community forums, events and more”. 

Luna Pricing is based on the tier as well as on the number of nodes used, with a minimum node count of three. A node is in this context defined as a “single Linux Java Virtual Machine that runs an instance of Apache Cassandra”. Subscribers have to commit for at least 12 months, since offers are only available for periods of that length with a choice of annual or monthly billing.

According to DataStax, the move is only logical, since the company “supported some of the largest and most mission-critical Cassandra deployments for the past 10 years” and also authors a lot of the code in Apache Cassandra.

To emphasize this engagement, the company used its product announcement to also point out the release of the free DataStax Apache Kafka Connector and Bulk Loader. Both tools are now available for users of Cassandra or the company’s own version of the database management system, DataStax Enterprise. 

While the bulk loader is meant to speed up the loading from and unloading to JSON and CSV files amongst other things, the Connector supposedly helps to move data between streaming platform Apache Kafka and the database. Details can be found on the tools’websites.