VMware’s SpringSource is acquiring database-caching software company GemStone Systems, the company announced Thursday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
With this purchase, VMware will obtain a set of technologies and expertise to address one of the major bottlenecks in cloud computing, that of scaling databases.
“GemStone solves a really important problem: If you are building applications that need to scale out in the enterprise or move to the cloud, you need to scale your applications without major architectural changes. GemStone’s technology has a proven capability of doing that,” said Rod Johnson, general manager of the SpringSource division of VMware, itself an EMC company.
GemStone’s flagship software is its GemFire Enterprise, an in-memory caching database for distributed platforms. In-memory databases work by storing the entire database within working memory, eliminating, or at least delaying, the time-intensive process of writing to and reading from a database on a disk.
“Basically what GemFire does is load live data into this middleware [layer], and Java applications interact with it in real time, as if it were a real data store. At the end of the day, that data is typically put back into a relational store or some sort of asynchronous end-of-day record,” said Richard Lamb, president of GemStone.
A privately held company based in Beaverton, Oregon, GemStone has about 100 employees. As a business entity it will be folded into SpringSource, though the GemStone nameplate may be retained, Johnson said.
SpringSource has pledged to continue to support GemStone’s current customer base, as well as the company’s other products, such as its software for running distributed Smalltalk applications, GemStone/S.