redis is single master so all non-local web servers will be extra slow. It is a poor solution for multi datacenter.

There's a whole class of applications that can happily serve data that slightly stale, so they can use any kind of replication/cluster to make data available on multiple datacenters, even if that makes for a little lag. Session data however must be instant, so that requires a very fast and stable replication, making the problem much harder. Redis is particularly unsuited to serve such data since it's single-master replication only. It's totally fine in a single datacenter, but fails once you move out. Redis cluster may or may not be a solution, but it's not here yet anyways.