Open Source Release Of 'Hibari,' A Database For Big Data

SAN MATEO, Calif., July 27. Gemini Mobile Technologies announced at Wireless Japan 2010 in Tokyo that it will release Hibari (meaning Cloud Bird in Japanese) as open source. Hibari is a database optimized for the highly reliable, highly available storage of massive data, so-called Big Data. Hibari can be used in Cloud Computing Applications such as web mail, Social Networking Services (SNS), and other services requiring storage of terabytes and petabytes of new daily data.

Hibari, developed by Gemini, is based on distributed non-relational database technologies of key value store and chain replication. These technologies bring benefits of low cost and high reliability by enabling data storage on tens or hundreds of PC servers, instead of costly special-purpose storage appliances such as SANs. Development started in 2005, and has been deployed and commercially proven in a number of large telecom operators, storing everything from SNS digital goods to Cloud Mail for millions of users.

Big Data applications are growing rapidly, fueled by tremendous growth in digital content, social media, automatically-generated data such as logs, histories, and telemetric statistics (electricity utilization, vehicle location information, etc.). By releasing Hibari to open sourcing, Gemini expects its commercially-proven, non-relational database technology to be used in a variety of fields, including enterprise private cloud computing, digital entertainment, e-commerce, financials, and telemetries.

Hibari is developed in Erlang, and is released under the Apache license. Hibari provides highly-versatile APIs including Amazon S3, JSON-RPC-RFC4627, Universal Binary Protocol, and soon-to-be-released Thrift, Avro and Google's Protocol Buffers; Hibari supports Java, C/C++, Python, Ruby, and Erlang. Gemini plans to provide Hadoop Map-Reduce integration as well as a commercial license which includes updates and support.