WANdisco’s LiveData release disrupts lock-in for the multicloud world
WANdisco PLC has made a big bet that the enterprise computing space over the next decade will be focused on moving massive amounts of data between multiple clouds. So far, there has been little evidence to prove the software specialist in distributed computing wrong.
A survey of attendees at AWS re:Invent in November, which was released last week, found that 58 percent of respondents were using more than one of the three largest cloud providers: Amazon Web Services Inc. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. More than a third were using AWS and Azure combined.
Less than a week before the AWS survey results became public, WANdisco announced general availability of LiveData for MultiCloud, the company’s distributed platform that enables large-scale data migrations and multicloud operations without disruption.
The key concept behind LiveData is that enterprises can store a replicated copy of information in multiple clouds, so if one copy fails an alternative is readily available.
“We made a pretty good bet that active-active replication, that live data, would be a critical component of both hybrid cloud and multicloud,” said David Richards (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of WANdisco. “That’s playing out really well for us.”
Richards spoke with John Furrier ( @furrier ), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. Jagane Sundar , chief technology officer of WANdisco, and Joel Horwitz , the company’s chief marketing officer, also spoke with Furrier in separate interviews, and they discussed how WANdisco’s technology can replicate data at petabyte scale, recent deals and partnerships, competition in the multicloud space, and continued emphasis on information security. (* Disclosure below.)
Watch the complete video interview with Richards below:
Petabyte scale replication
LiveData for MultiCloud covers regions or a mix of cloud services and on-premises storage operations, including Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud, IBM, Oracle, and Alibaba Cloud, among others. According to WANdisco, it is the only platform that can enable continuous replication of data at petabyte scale with zero information loss or downtime.
The ability to move data at petabyte scale is significant because datasets are expanding rapidly as applications become instrumental in running critical business operations.
“I can’t just lift and shift for a thousand applications running against the dataset,” Richards said. “In order to achieve the kind of scale they need, companies are going to have to do this in cloud. That was the bet we made, and it was the right bet.”
Major deal with Azure
WANdisco’s recent deal flow and partnerships offer a measure of confirmation that this may indeed be the right bet. In January, the company announced its largest cloud deal with an unnamed major U.S. health insurer. The deal leveraged data migration and a co-seller relationship with Microsoft Corp. and its Azure cloud platform.
“We’re able to move petabyte scale data from their on-premises systems into the cloud without any interruption to service, without any blocking,” Richards said. “Our pipeline is now full of companies all trying to do that.”
The company has been active with other cloud providers. Earlier in January, WANdisco announced a new jointly-engineered solution with IBM Corp. to support Db2 Big SQL relational database technology. It marked the first time WANdisco’s technology had been applied to SQL data, according to company executives. The company also won a three-year contract through IBM with another healthcare provider in the U.S.
WANdisco has relationships with AWS and Alibaba Group as well. In January, WANdisco revealed that it had secured a contract with a major mobile network operator to provide its Fusion product across multiple clouds on AWS to replicate data.
