Caution: Increasing the VMware HA timeout value also increases the amount of time before real failures are detected. A longer failure detection time may cause a longer outage

Posted by Derek Collison
Cloud Service Division

I am pleased to announce that Salvatore Sanfilippo, the key developer for Redis, has decided to join the VMware engineering team. 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.

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). Many Redis customers have already experienced the tremendous benefit of storing select pieces of data within Redis for fast access, customized layout and access patterns. Some have used Redis exclusively, forgoing a relational database all together, since Redis offers several ways to persist the data it manages.

As cloud computing continues to push the bounds of how we define a cloud application, many exciting and new technologies will join the relational database as a means to store and retrieve data. Cloud based infrastructure itself has led the way in this regard, pushing the envelope for scale, performance, and access to large distributed data. This is most evident in Google's App Engine, utilizing several pieces of key technologies like BigTable to store data at scale.

VMware believes these technologies should be beneficial to all. The openness of the cloud computing community matches well with the open source nature of Redis and joins our open source efforts that currently include Spring and Zimbra.  VMware is committed to Redis and the open source community, and therefore in having Salvatore continue his valuable work with Redis. Everyone is encouraged to learn more about Redis and use it within their systems.

There are several places on the internet to find information regarding Redis. If you do not already know about Redis, I encourage you to learn more from some of the links listed below.

Welcome Salvatore and Redis to VMware!

=derek