1. The Need for Speed
Imagine you are a courier. Working day and night, your job consists of delivering
packages from A to B as efficiently as possible. Depending on your route and the
obstacles in your path, the vehicle you choose can make the difference between failure
and success. While it might not matter so much if a deserted four lane highway lies
between you and your destination, it will definitely come into play as traffic grows more
congested in ever fewer lanes.
Have you ever been sitting bumper to bumper gridlocked as you watched
someone on a sport bike weave in and out of traffic, splitting lanes and moving at ten
times the speed you were moving? Or have you been in a busy part of downtown and
watched a cyclist cutting down the sidewalks and through parks while all of the cars
start and stop rhythmically in congestion? It always seems at those moments that you
are in the wrong vehicle at the wrong time.
These analogies illustrate the fundamentals of what Redis does best, where it fits
and how it can accelerate data center processing. Redis is that sport bike. It splits lanes
and effortlessly mitigates the traffic of high volume calls for data. Redis is that cyclist
avoiding congestion altogether. Redis operates in memory and doesn’t get involved in
the mass traffic to persistent storage, making it faster and able to respond with sub-
millisecond latency, while still preserving the reliable consistency and permanence of
data. But most importantly it plays the role of that speedy courier, delivering your data
from A to B in an efficient manner that the other vehicles on the road just can’t match.

2. If you are throwing hardware at the problem and relying on traditional “18-
wheeler” databases teamed with expensive storage infrastructures to drive your
applications, you might consider letting the Redis “sport bike” deliver your high traffic
transactions. This is exactly what it does best.
When you need data at high volume, high speed and low latency : Think Redis.
Kalin Seamans
Clear Technologies
Kseamans@cleartechnologies.net