What is GemFire?

Generally the GemFire is a Command-line utility that allows you to start, stop, and otherwise manage GemFire locators from an operating system command prompt. The utility also provides license information and log management and merging. explained by Google web dictionary
GemFire Enterprise is in-memory distributed data management platform that pools memory (and CPU, network and optionally local disk) across multiple processes to manage application objects and behavior. Using dynamic replication and data partitioning techniques, GemFire Enterprise offers continuous availability, high performance and linear scalability for data intensive applications without compromising on data consistency, even under failure conditions. In addition to being a distributed data container, it is an active data management system that uses an optimized low latency distribution layer for reliable asynchronous event notifications and guaranteed message delivery. explained by gemstone.


Contributed by VMware.
Why companies are moving to GemFire ?
All companies are struggling with the growth of information overload often referred to as “Big Data,” some IT developers and database deploys are approaching the challenge with a cloud-based service designed to make accessing mass amounts of data faster. In short  they are started to move to GemFire.
GemFire is a distributed in-memory data grid database software product that enables data distribution, data replication and partitioning (sharding- DB term), cashing data management at the exact moment the information is needed.
While the ability to move data from server to server and replicate it to more than one location has proven invaluable over the last few years, today's critical challenge is how can companies manage this data properly.

• Maintain simultaneous data connections over long distances.
• Protect their data from disasters.
• Maintain data reliability and availability, even when server hardware periodically fails.

The software is able to achieve these goals by creating an object-oriented "data fabric" across a server cluster. It accesses copies of data that are stored in various locations as needed. To ensure compatibility with the latest cloud configurations, the management platform can spread the data across many virtual machines and GemFire servers to manage application objects.