Redis and in-memory data grids are pretty different animals. I would characterize IMDG's like Geode to be concurrent write intensive, and have flexible data models. It also scales out better than Redis in a more automated fashion.

Redis is a great read-intensive cache. It also has a powerful data model, but you have to use their data models. Example: If you want to run calculations on lists or sets, they have powerful operations you can call.

IMDG's such as Geode were built with the rise of automated trading in the finance industry.

Geode also understands Redis protocol, so you can point your Redis clients to Geode. This is interesting because the problem with Redis data structures is that they cannot scale beyond the memory available to the Redis server. The further limitation that Redis server is single threaded and cannot really be scaled up, only makes the problem worse.

With Geode your Redis data structures can scale horizontally.

This

> Data is persisted in write-optimized disk storage. Consistency checking is configurable between highest performance caching and ACID transactions.

seems pretty different to redis. I don't think Redis does ACID transactions.

Here's an old post showing how to create a custom indexing schemes in Geode (QuadTreeIndex for spatial data): http://blogs.vmware.com/vfabric/2012/12/gemfire-patternspart...