CAMBRIDGE, MA – August 3, 2010 – Riak Technologies today announced Wikia, Inc. has selected Riak, Riak’s next-generation distributed data store, as the foundation for a new set of global services. Wikia is the 70th largest site on the Internet according to Quantcast and brings millions of people together daily to create and discover engaging content. Wikia selected Riak over traditional databases and other emerging data storage technologies to distribute its data around the world and bring it closer to its global audience.
“Riak has allowed us to do something that was impossible before,” said Artur Bergman, Wikia’s Vice President of Engineering and Operations. “With Riak we can break through the ceiling on performance imposed by traditional database technologies and continue to improve the experience of our users. We invest in technology that benefits Wikia’s growing user base, therefore Riak made perfect sense. Riak is fast, easy to run, and extremely resilient to the failure scenarios anyone with real operational experience knows are all too common.”
Founded in 2008 by former Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) executives and senior engineers, Riak designed Riak to provide the same high availability and rapid scaling properties provided by leading content delivery networks. Applications built with Riak can sustain catastrophic server, data center, and network failures without outages, while avoiding the complexity and expense that characterize applications built using traditional databases.
“Riak is excited to have a respected and forward-looking client like Wikia so readily embrace Riak,” said Earl Galleher, Riak’s Chairman and CEO. “More and more, we see companies reject the limitations of traditional databases like Oracle and MySQL in favor of Riak’s flexibility and ease of use. Riak doesn’t just solve problems for organizations running applications on old database architectures; it frees them to build entirely new classes of applications.”
Wikia intends to deploy a replicated user session service running simultaneously in three data centers in the U.S. and Europe, replacing its current solution which is restricted to a single data center. Mr. Bergman has already contributed a file system adapter to the Riak open source community which will be used in the Wikia production environment.
“We did not set out to build a disruptive technology. We simply wanted to solve a problem faced by anyone running old database technologies,” said Mr. Galleher. “We have only scratched the surface of what Riak can do.”
About Wikia
Wikia, founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, is the place where millions of passionate people come to discover, create, and share an abundance of information on thousands of topics. Wikia sites are written by community members that are deeply excited and knowledgeable about subjects ranging from video games, television shows, and movies to food, fashion, and environmental sustainability. With over four million pages of content and 150,000 enthusiast communities, Wikia attracts more than 30 million unique global visitors per month and has been listed in the Quantcast top 100 sites on the Internet since early 2009.
About Riak Technologies
Riak Technologies, Inc., founded in January 2008 by a core group of software architects, engineers, and executive leadership from Akamai Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq:AKAM – News), is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Riak produces Riak, a distributed data store that combines extreme fault tolerance, rapid scalability, and ease of use. Designed from the ground up to work with applications that run on the Internet and mobile networks, Riak is particularly well-suited for users of cloud infrastructure such as Amazon’s AWS and Joyent’s Smart platform and is available in both an open source and a paid commercial version. Current customers of Riak include Comcast Corporation, MIG-CAN, and Mochi Media.
