Pivotal has announced that it has released the open source core of GemFire, Geode, which is a distributed in-memory database.

Additionally, Pivotal has submitted a proposal to the Apache Software Foundation to incubate Project Geode under ASF governance. The purpose of this would be to help grow an open source community around the project.

Pivotal has stated that it will contribute to the Project Geode community, as well as producing the commercial distribution of Pivotal GemFire.

Geode consists of over a million lines of code and has been developed over 12 years. It provides in-memory access for operation data which is spread across hundreds of nodes, which enables it to provide low latency data access.

Sundeep Madra, Vice President, Data Product Group, Pivotal , said: "The opening sourcing of core components of products in the Pivotal Big Data Suite heralds a new era of how big data is done in the enterprise."

"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."

"Geode is an important part of building solutions for next generation data infrastructures and we welcome the community to join us in furthering Geode’s already compelling capabilities."

Current customers will be able to join the Project Geode community in order to contribute to areas that are critical to their specific uses.

Philippe Lantin, Senior Principal Architect, Enterprise Architecture, CDK, said: "We applaud Pivotal’s commitment to open source. Open source software lets us quickly get familiar with the internal structure and subtleties of a product, and better understand how we can develop solutions that take full advantage of what is available."

"The opportunity to contribute is of great value to our R&D engineers."