Garantia Data is now Redis Labs, a name change that reflect its roots as a database provider that uses the Redis open-source technology, a popular NoSQL database used by developers at companies like Pinterest and Twitter.
It’s the second time in the past three months the company has said it is changing its name. In the fall, Garantia changed its name to RedisDB but after some retort from the open-source Redis community, the company pulled back and kept the Garantia name. This time, the company says there is no going back — it is now Redis Labs.
Redis Labs, based out of Israel and Santa Clara, has gained acceptance in a short period of time for how it can provide infinite scalability of a Redis cluster. It also offers a degree of automation as pointed out in a blog post by Giovanni Bajo, a computer programmer:
…This means that when you provision a Redis server, you start paying for 25 Mb of RAM, and you can keep growing up to Gigabytes of RAM without ever restarting your Redis instance. It never changes IP or DNS address, you never need to manually setup replications, to plan downtimes, etc. You use as much RAM as you want on the same Redis instance you provisioned the first day.
It made sense for the company to change its name last November but the choice proved not so favorable with the Redis creator. “We were about to change our company name to RedisDB and even acquired the domain redisdb.com for that purpose; however, respecting a request by Salvatore Sanfillipo, the Redis creator, we decided to stick to Garantia Data,” said Co-Founder and CEO Ofer Bengal last November.
Redis is known for its fast datastore, making it a favorite with developers. Garantia has been one of the top contributors to the Redis community, which the company says is reason to give it the Redis Labs name. It has a commercial version of Redis with 1,300 customers, said Vice President of Marketing Cameron Peron. For example, customers use it for real-time analytics, social app functionality and tasks such as job management.
In November, the company made its Redis service available on Amazon Web Services. And earlier this month the service became available on SoftLayer, the infrastructure as a service acquired by IBM earlier this year. The SoftLayer integration is designed the complexities of configuring open-source Redis on SoftLayer virtual servers. There are scaling barriers, vulnerabilities that makes data volatile, the need for advanced knowledge on configuring both Redis and SoftLayer, and ongoing management of Redis. With Redis Labs, much of the manual configuration is automated to be set up out of the box.
There is a trend emerging in the enterprise that is evident with companies like SoftLayer. There’s a new stack that combines fine-grained services with powerful databases that runs on sophisticated infrastructure. The Redis/SoftLayer integration represents a part of that new stack. Amazon Web Services, for example, runs RedShift, which is described as a data warehouse in the cloud. It’s again a service that runs on a powerful database technology atop the AWS infrastructure.
Image: Flickr/Tim Jones