I've got to say that the more I hear "Redis can never be reliable" the more I cringe. It just seems like one of those things that's been said and repeated without people stopping to fact-check along the way.
Right now Redis cannot be clustered production-ready. I wish. As I stated in the Wiki, you'll have to pry Redis from my dead body, I am very happy with it, and for me its a true swiss army knife and I've used it as such.
Even though it doesn't have clustering - it's rock solid in production and I haven't experienced a drop in one of my Redis servers in around 3 years.
That being said, if you are building a system where reliability is an explicit requirement you can't take those risks.
Still in beta/alpha as far as I last checked (we've been waiting for it). Additionally as far as clustering is concerned there still seem to be a lot of 'unknowns' for me with clustering Redis. Using a cluster in RabbitMQ is dead simple and it just works.
Even though it doesn't have clustering - it's rock solid in production and I haven't experienced a drop in one of my Redis servers in around 3 years.
That being said, if you are building a system where reliability is an explicit requirement you can't take those risks.