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A high profile open source developer Salvatore Sanfilippo (@antirez) joined VMware engineering team today. He is the project owner of Redis. Welcome Salvatore!

As Derek Collision (@derekcollison) described it at a VMware Console Blog,

Redis is a high performance and scalable advanced key-value store where values can be data structures such as lists, sets, and hashmaps, as well as strings and blobs. Redis supports atomic operations on these data structures, allowing extremely high performance with consistent state to many client applications.

Why VMware is intersted in Redis?

As VMware continues its investments in the context of cloud computing, technologies such as Redis become key for future cloud based apps, whether private or public cloud, and the cloud infrastructure itself. Large scale systems benefit greatly when there are alternatives to storing state within a centralized relational store (RDBMS).

So it’s all about cloud computing, where Redis can provide a great alternative to traditional RDBMS. I am sure there will soon be Redis virtual appliance which is tuned to run on vSphere. Maybe such an appliance is there already. But the difference is that it will be backed by VMware.

In addition to the key/value store in which Redis fits, there are other types of NoSQL datastores, for example, document stores, extensible record stores. If you are interested in knowing more about the NoSQL movement, what options are there, and how they compare, you may find this paper(PDF) by Rick Cattell very useful. Thanks to Jian Zhen (@zhenjl) for discovering this paper and sharing it with us. You should definitely follow him if you want to be updated with what is happening with VMware vCloud.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.