GridGain Goes Open Source Under Apache v2.0

Yesterday GridGain released it's 6.0 version under the Apache 2.0 open source license. Our CTO, Nikita Ivanov, wrote about the new GridGain features and licensing in his blog here, so I will not repeat them. Instead, I will briefly describe our vision behind In-Memory Computing and why we made the move to open source.

Why is In-Memory Computing important? The simple answer is that there is no other way to process today’s enormous data volumes. In order to get answers from 100’s of terabytes of data in milliseconds you absolutely must have an In-Memory solution in your architecture. This is being validated by not just GridGain. Large vendors, such as Oracle (in-memory database and in-memory Exadata), IBM (BLU analytics), SAP (Hana), are also moving in the same direction.

So, with all those solutions out there, what makes GridGain different? In a nutshell, we provide a unified In-Memory Computing Platform aimed to solve a wide range of use cases. Our platform is composed of multiple natively integrated products, including High Performance Computing (HPC), the industry’s fastest In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG), CEP-based Streaming, and a plug-and-play Apache Hadoop Accelerator. With our new open source strategy, all of these products are now freely available for download, either a la carte or together as part of a larger platform edition.

With GridGain In-Memory Computing Platform you can process in parallel 100s of thousands of computational jobs per second, store terabytes of data in memory for fast transactional access and SQL querying, index into never-ending streams of incoming data, or give your Hadoop installations up to 100x boost.

We've been around the block as well. The product has been vetted by many customers, including large production deployments exceeding thousands of nodes. Open sourcing our platform just seemed like a natural way to share our technology with community and continue growing as a part of a larger in-memory eco-system. Unlike other commercial open source offerings, we went with a very liberal Apache license and with a feature set more than adequate to give GridGain open source users the ability to deploy in production. The product even includes Management and Monitoring, which most vendors rarely offer free of change.

In the upcoming days, I will be giving coding examples, demonstrating the ease of use of our APIs, and sharing various use cases. In the mean time, please feel free to download GridGain and give it a try. You can start by taking a look at our Getting Started guide and trying a few examples.