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Pivotal, EMC’s big data development platform-as-a-service (PaaS) division, on April 13 released Geode, a distributed in-memory database, to the open-source community as a key part of the eventual release of its entire big data platform to the community.
Geode is the open-source core of Pivotal GemFire. Officially, Pivotal has submitted a proposal to the Apache Software Foundation to incubate Project Geode under ASF governance in order to grow a vibrant open-source community around Geode. The code is available for review now at network.pivotal.io.
Pivotal will contribute to and continue to help build the Project Geode community while simultaneously producing its commercial distribution of Pivotal GemFire, the company’s enterprise in-memory database.
Geode and GemFire compete directly and indirectly in the market with SAP HANA, Teradata and Oracle products. Originally developed to serve data for 24/7 applications in the financial industry, Geode features built-in failover and resilient self-healing clusters to allow developers to meet stringent service-level requirements for data accessibility.
“We’re in the process of open-sourcing our whole data platform, the whole set of data offerings in our portfolio,” Michael Cucchi, Pivotal senior director of product marketing, told eWEEK. The full rollout to open source, which started with Cloud Foundry a year ago, is expected to be completed by the end of 2015.
“The rest of our platform, other than the data products, was always open. We open-sourced SpringSource, Groovy and others, so we’ve had a fully open-source stack, except for these traditional proprietary data products,” Cucchi said.
GemFire will continue to feature enterprise-level support and maintenance as well as proprietary features only available from Pivotal, such as native clients, continuous queries and WAN-connectivity between clusters, Cucchi said.
Geode consists of more than 1 million lines of code developed over a span of 12 years by Pivotal and its predecessors. Like Pivotal GemFire, Geode is a distributed in-memory database for high-scale custom applications, providing in-memory access for all operational data spread across hundreds of nodes.
Its inherent agility and scalability enables Geode to provide low-latency data access to applications at massive scale with many concurrent transactions involving terabytes of operational data, Cucchi said.
Geode is designed for maintaining consistency of concurrent operations across its distributed data nodes. It can support ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) transactions for massively scaled applications, such as stock trading, financial payments and ticket sales, already proven in customer deployments of more than 10 million user transactions a day.
“Starting with core code in Pivotal GemFire, the components we intend to contribute to the open-source community are already performing in the most hardened and demanding enterprise environments,” said Sundeep Madra, vice president of the Data Product Group at Pivotal. “Geode is an important part of building solutions for next-generation data infrastructures.”
Current users of Pivotal GemFire will be able to directly influence the core product road map by joining the Project Geode community and contributing in the areas that are critical to their specific use cases.
With expected governance from the ASF, customers pursuing open-source-first policies can now make 100 percent open-source-oriented decisions without sacrificing product capability, resilience or value, Cucchi said.
Pivotal, whose project management tool, Pivotal Tracker, is currently used by about a quarter-million developers around the world, was acquired by storage and data protection giant EMC and VMware in March 2012.