Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store that can be used as a data structure server since it supports strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets. It is written in C, works on most POSIX systems, and can be accessed from many programming languages. Redis provides options for data persistence like snapshots and write-ahead logging, and can be replicated for scalability and high availability. It supports master-slave replication, sentinel-based master detection, and sharding via Redis clusters. Redis has been widely adopted by many companies and is used in applications like microblogging services.