The company's latest database product, dubbed Citrusleaf 2.0, launched this past spring and currently has around 10 customers using it. The company says that "the most common deployments" for the database are "terabytes of data, billions of objects, and 200K plus transactions per second per node, with sub-millisecond latency." In other words, Citrusleaf 2.0 moves a lot of data with virtually no latency.

One of the major applications that Citrusleaf 2.0 performs is real-time bidding, a process that the company says "allows advertisers to analyze a site's users individually and to determine in real-time the right ad to serve based on a split second look into that user's buying habits and personal information." So if you're an advertising company that needs to get ads individually placed on sites depending on individuals' tastes and needs, you'll be able to get it up in real-time as the user is loading the page.

The company does this by combining traditional database technologies with a distributed system architecture that contains three key layers: a Client Layer that stores client libraries, a Distribution Layer that Citrusleaf says "is responsible for the cluster communication and cluster management operations," and a Data Storage layer that, unsurprisingly, is responsible for data storage.

"We've built a distributed database where each individual database works together as part of a distributed system," says Bulkowski, whose company received seed funding in March from Alsop Louie Partners. "That's why this is a cloud-oriented system. If the load is a certain level and you only have four servers they just don't go that fast. That's where distributed technology comes in because you can add servers to handle the load now."

Cloudability