Yesterday VMware announced that hired the founder and lead developer of Redis: Salvatore Sanfilippo.
Redis is an open source, journaled key-value data store.
By some degrees it can be considered a database server what can operate in two modes: it can keep its entire dataset in RAM and save it on disc asynchronously from time to time, or it can save every change in the dataset as it happens, using an append file.
Redis is not yet fault tolerant. It should get clustering capabilities after version 2.0 is released.
It’s written in ANSI C and supported in a number of programming languages, including Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, C# and Java.
The announcement come from Derek Collison, hired in August 2009 as Software Architect for Cloud Services at VMware. Collison is a former Technical Director at Google, and before that he was Senior Vice President and Chief Architect at TIBCO Software.
VMware sees Redis as a key component for future cloud-oriented applications and cloud computing infrastructures, associating this move to the acquisitions of SpringSource (August 2009) and Zimbra (January 2010).
By hiring Sanfilippo, VMware is de facto funding the development of Redis.
At the end of January, the company’s CEO Paul Maritz explicitly declared its interest in middleware technologies, so VMware may act similarly with other projects that fits its new strategy to build a complete software stack.