RainStor was a

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

company that developed a

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases span ...

. The company originated as a project by the

United Kingdom's The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

Ministry of Defence {{unsourced, date=February 2021 A ministry of defence or defense (see spelling differences), also known as a department of defence or defense, is an often-used name for the part of a government responsible for matters of defence, found in states ...

to store volumes of data from field operations for ongoing analysis and training purposes. RainStor was headquartered in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, with R&D in

Gloucester Gloucester ( ) is a cathedral city and the county town of Gloucestershire in the South West of England. Gloucester lies on the River Severn, between the Cotswolds to the east and the Forest of Dean to the west, east of Monmouth and east ...

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

. The company was acquired by

Teradata Teradata Corporation is an American software company that provides cloud database and analytics-related software, products, and services. The company was formed in 1979 in Brentwood, California, as a collaboration between researchers at Caltech a ...

in 2014, and in December 2016 Teradata removed Rainstor from its portfolio.

History

RainStor, originally named Clearpace, was founded in 2002 in the United Kingdom. The company was originally created to exploit technology that was developed by the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence to store big data under the brand name DeX. The company rebranded DeX as NParchive, which deduplicated and archived rarely used data, in 2008. The company and product were renamed to RainStor (a portmanteau of relational archiving infrastructure storage) in December 2009, coinciding with a move of the management office from the United Kingdom to San Francisco. The release of version 3.5 of RainStor software, announced in May 2009, coincided with the company's

rebranding Rebranding is a marketing strategy in which a new name, term, symbol, design, concept or combination thereof is created for an established brand with the intention of developing a new, differentiated identity in the minds of consumers, investors ...

. RainStor received $7.5 million in venture funding from Storm Ventures, Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, Informatica, and The Dow Company in March 2010. In 2011, it received some marketing awards. In October 2012, RainStor received $12 million in venture funding from

Credit Suisse Credit Suisse Group AG is a global investment bank and financial services firm founded and based in Switzerland. Headquartered in Zürich, it maintains offices in all major financial centers around the world and is one of the nine global " ...

, Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, Storm Ventures, the

Dow Chemical Company The Dow Chemical Company, officially Dow Inc., is an American multinational chemical corporation headquartered in Midland, Michigan, United States. The company is among the three largest chemical producers in the world. Dow manufactures plastic ...

, and Rogers Venture Partners. In October 2012, the company reported over 100 clients, including government agencies and

telecommunications Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...

and

finance Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fina ...

companies, and in 2014, Teradata acquired RainStor.

Product

RainStor provided software for query and analysis against large volumes of machine-generated data and an online data archive for

regulatory compliance In general, compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Compliance has traditionally been explained by reference to the deterrence theory, according to which punishing a behavior will decrease the viol ...

data retention. In October 2012, RainStor held two patents and was pursuing five additional patents. The database uses a row/columnar hybrid repository. The archived data is accessed using Structured Query Language (SQL). RainStor software uses partition filtering, which excludes certain records from processing. RainStor runs on

Apache Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage ...

. In June 2013, RainStor released version 5.5 of its software, which added user authentication protocols, access controls and policies, data encryption and user activity logs. In May 2014, the company announced protection for data from manipulation, malicious attacks, breaches, or deletion. Since Teradata removed Rainstor from its portfolio in December 2016, it is no longer being developed or marketed.

References

{{Reflist, 2 Software companies established in 2004 Defunct software companies of the United States Companies based in San Francisco Teradata