the clients are thrift, and the commonly used ones (java, python, ruby, C++, php), are robust, although the thrift devs are slow to apply patches sometimes (all the php users I know have applied <a href="http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-347" rel="nofollow">http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-347</a>).<p>redis is faster per node, but does not scale, there is not much to compare. :)