Along the course of theCube’s pursuit of interesting and smart guests at Strata+ Hadoop World 2012, we came across John Bantleman, CEO of Rainstor. Rainstor is a database designed to manage Big Data for large enterprises at the lowest total cost. The company’s database products come in two editions: Big Data Retention and Big Data Analytics on Hadoop. They are designed to efficiently and cost-effectively manage multi-structured data sets and make them fully accessible for ongoing query and analysis. During the first part of the interview, Bantleman enthusiastically announced the $12 million in funding his company received over the past few weeks from a number of investors. The cash will be used to further develop their “very capable and very robust solution to big data.” This marks a very good progress for the company. When asked to talk about the specific and general Rainstor innovation, Bantleman said: “The innovation around most platforms is scalability. So If you think about Hadoop, Hadoop is about distributed scale out. Generally, even though Hadoop gets a lot of press, Hadoop is generally about brute force. If you have big enough data problem and if you have big enough machines, then you can solve this issue. “What Rainstor brings is an intelligence and efficiency to that. So the first part that we bring is the ability to store data in a very unique and very efficient form. 20, 30, 40, 50x. That means we’re reducing data by 90-99 percent. So if you take a petabyte of data and you put it at Rainstor, and you’re physically taking 35 terabytes of this, you’ve changed the problem. You have fundamentally changed the problem.”