Digital Reasoning Systems, a software company in Franklin, Tenn., is working with undisclosed U.S. government agencies to deliver a Cassandra-based system for intelligence-related applications–such as looking for suspicious terms and connections between people in huge quantities of documents in a variety of formats, including Word documents and transcripts of recordings of phone calls, says Dave Danielson, its vice president of marketing. “They have some problems in finding bad guys in hundreds of millions of documents,” he says. Digital Reasoning’s own software helps store and categorize such unstructured information in Cassandra, using the technology to help narrow down searches that might pull up millions of documents into the ten to thirty or so that human analyst need to look at, Danielson says.

“Apache Cassandra is the database for big data,” said Matt Pfeil, CEO and co-founder of Riptano. “Digital Reasoning is doing interesting work within the intelligence community that is resulting in a deployment of Cassandra across hundreds of nodes for millions of documents. We're excited Digital Reasoning is giving back to the community by open sourcing their software to deploy Cassandra on Amazon EC2. This will save time and make it easier to run Cassandra in the cloud.”