The problem with this new product is that their business model seems to be selling the software with hardware and there are no indications that the software is open source. As such, it's really more a competitor for other proprietary products since their pricing starts in the $100,000 range.

I know that it's become fashionable to write of MySQL or SQL in general and many large sites are migrating away from it to non-relational data stores. However, for many sites, MySQL does a wonderful job and relational features cut down development time. The founder of Flickr spoke to this at a Django conference saying something to the effect of, "ever since there was more than 200 sites on the internet, it has been better to target a framework at the rest of the internet than at the top 100 sites". Specifically, he was speaking to sharding and other highly scalable techniques that Django doesn't deal with natively and saying that the vast, vast majority of sites will never have to deal with those questions.

Relational technology definitely has its place and does offer developers advantages. And relational technology does scale for some high-traffic operations. Look at Wikipedia. It's the 6th most trafficked site in the world and backed by MySQL. Granted, they do use caching and other techniques as well, but it's a highly available, highly trafficked site. In fact, I can't remember the last time I heard about Wikipedia going down.

New technology directions are great. I'm really excited about Cassandra. Do we really have to declare something dead and something else the winner?