Caster is a software product and service designed to be a friendly and stable replacement for Hadoop that is not only highly performant, but intuitive to deploy and manage. Caster is the answer the question, “What if Apple had written Hadoop?”.

We are endeavoring to rethink the distributed computing concepts that hadoop brought into the enterprise mainstream by consolidating the key components of hadoop and other associated apache projects from a fractured hodgepodge of disjoint java applications into a unified, native application. The resulting software is our core product which we will licence to customers via multi-tiered, automated yearly subscriptions with bundled support. This revenue model is similar to that used by Cloudera and Hortonworks; these companies produce software that helps install and manage standard hadoop installations.

In addition to licensing software that customers can install and manage themselves, we are also planning a hosting service where customers can take advantage of Caster’s features without managing the software or hardware, and each month they are billed an amount proportional to their usage in terms of storage, traffic, and processing time.