Fortune 500 enterprises adopt Open Source in-memory "Fast Data" platform to process large-scale data sets in real-time, at orders of magnitude faster than traditional technologies.

Forest Hill, MD –25 August 2015– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache™ Ignite™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.
Apache Ignite is a high-performance, integrated and distributed In-Memory Data Fabric for computing and transacting on large-scale data sets in real-time, orders of magnitude faster than possible with traditional disk-based or flash technologies. It is designed to easily power both existing and new applications in a distributed, massively parallel architecture on affordable, industry-standard hardware.
"Apache Ignite addresses today's Fast Data needs by providing a comprehensive in-memory data fabric, which includes a data grid with SQL and transactional capabilities, in-memory streaming, an in-memory file system, and more," said Dmitriy Setrakyan, Vice President of the Apache Ignite project and co-founder of GridGain Systems. 
Unlike other Big Data processing solutions, Apache Ignite is an in-memory computing (IMC) system, where RAM is treated as a primary storage facility (as opposed to being used exclusively for processing). As such, Ignite's memory-first approach is more efficient and faster: with improved system indexes, reduced data fetch time, and no delays in a stream content processing, among other benefits.
"Apache Ignite leverages and integrates a host of Apache projects to solve real-time business issues, including Spark, Hadoop, YARN and Mesos," said Dr. Konstantin Boudnik, Apache Ignite Project Management Committee Mentor and Vice President of Open Source Development at WANdisco. "It's exciting that it is graduating to a top-level project. We look forward to working further with the Apache Ignite community to make more enhancements that will benefit customers with real-time requirements and the need for highest performance and scale from their applications. "
"As the speed of memory continues to outpace the capabilities of even the highest performing disks, the importance of managing large pools of RAM at scale increases," said Roman Shaposhnik, Apache Ignite Mentor, and Director of Open Source at Pivotal. "It is essential to innovate at the same pace and the Apache Ignite community is certainly innovative. The enthusiasm in the area of in-memory computing is unmistakable, and the ASF is where important advances happen. It is exciting to see the work of Apache communities advancing the state of Fast Data with projects such as Apache Ignite, Spark, Geode and Flink."
Apache Ignite meets the growing trend for many enterprises seeking to adopt in-memory computing and replace hard drives as their primary storage system, where speed, superior caching, and strong consistency are key concerns. Ignite's ability to reduce latencies and increase application performance bridges Big Data with 'Fast Data' –bringing highly consistent computation and transactions on large data sets in real time. Additionally, Ignite's flexible programming model means it can be run from anywhere –whether a laptop, a commodity cluster, or a supercomputer– with APIs available for Java, Scala, C++, and .NET/C#. 
"Apache Ignite is a maverick of distributed computing," said Raul Kripalani, member of the Apache Camel Project Management Committee, and Integration/Messaging/Big Data Consultant and Engineer. "Rather than focusing on a single goal, it harnesses the power of multiple JVMs to offer services that no modern application can do without, such as caching, streaming and workload distribution. The team is talented, the documentation is superb and the technology has lots of potential."
"Having been with the project from its inception, I am very excited to see our community rapidly grow and build one of the most scalable, performant, and battle tested in-memory data processing platforms on the market today," added Setrakyan.
Catch Apache Ignite in action at Apache: Big Data Europe on 28-30 September 2015 http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-europe/ In addition, members of the Apache Ignite community will be present at the Big Data Innovation Summit (9-10 September/Boston), Strata Hadoop World (29 September–1 October/New York), and JavaOne (25-29 October/San Francisco).
Availability and Oversight
Apache Ignite software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Ignite, visit http://ignite.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheIgnite
About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 550 individual Members and 4,700 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Cerner, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.
© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Flink", "Apache Flink", "Geode", "Apache Geode", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", "Hadoop YARN", "Apache Hadoop YARN", "Ignite", "Apache Ignite", "Mesos", "Apache Mesos", "Spark", "Apache Spark", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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