Intel Capital and Red Hat have invested in 10gen bringing the total raised by the company to $81 million. 10gen is the sponsor for MongoDB, the popular open source NoSQL database.
An exact amount of the investment was not disclosed, but according to CrunchBase and other sources, 10gen had raised $73.4 million prior to today’s news. That would peg this new investment at $7.6 million between the two companies. In May of this year, New Enterprise Associates led a $42 million round with existing investors. In-Q-Tel followed in September with an undisclosed round.
The Series E investment will go toward product development and worldwide community development.
MongoDB represents a shift in the database market as more companies look beyond the traditional relational database especially as the amount of data balloons and the types of data needed to process shifts from “structured data,” that you get in spreadsheets to “unstructured” data that comes from Twitter, Facebook and other sources.
Scaled out architectures with NoSQL databases have different issues than relational databases. 10gen President Max Schireson said in an interview last week that Intel is looking at future hardware designs as more companies start using more parallel processing and shift to solid state disk (SSD) drives. SSD drives, once the mainstay of laptops and mobile devices, have become popular for servers as they are far faster and more efficient than mechanical hard disk drives. But SSDs are still not commonly used so there is still optimization that needs to be done.
Schireson said they have had 3 million downloads, most on Intel x86 servers. The shift has implications for enterprise clients such as HP and Dell that use Intel x86 processors for the servers and systems they sell to end customers which have an increased interest in running cloud environments on NoSQL databases.
Red Hat and 10gen have complementary technologies, Schireson said. In particular, the two companies mention OpenShift, Red Hat’s platform as a service (PaaS). MongoDB originally had intentions to be a PaaS in the mold of a Heroku or Engine Yard.
In October, 10gen and RedHat also announced that they would collaborate on developing a standard way for JBOSS developers to access the MongoBD NoSQL data stores. JBOSS is the Java application server used widely in the enterprise.
10gen is making a play to serve as the most prominent NoSQL database to run cloud infrastructures. That serves as a strong basis for working with Intel on its server chips and Red Hat on OpenSift, JBOSS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.