A global telecom finds their Eureka! moment with WANdisco

By Tony Velcich
Dec 07, 2020

A global telecom finds their Eureka! moment with WANdisco            

At WANdisco, creating solutions is in our DNA. We also like challenges — the kind that take a little bit of time to solve, and force us to think so far out of the box that we have to push against the proverbial wall to find an answer.

The reason? We love that Eureka! moment, where the solution presents itself, in its elegant, all-encompassing way and you realize it’s been there the entire time. The trick is training your mind to look in the unsuspecting places. It’s there that synergy, growth and true business development happens.

Admittedly, when we were recently approached for a partnership with a global telecom giant, we got excited. We knew that those electric Eureka! moments were going to be on the table for us quite frequently and we were looking forward. Here’s a story of one of them.

This client, based in Asia with operations in 18 countries across multiple continents, has a production Cloudera Hadoop cluster consisting of 350 nodes with 4 PB of data and growing at a rate of 30 TB per day. They use this Hadoop cluster for an open network initiative that provides total transparency and real-time information about a massive, fully-linked network of maps, signals and internet areas to its customers. It’s an incredibly impressive customer experience initiative, and we wanted to be part of it.

We knew that we could provide this company with their own unique Eureka! moment. By introducing them to the real-time consistency and automation of data replication processes available via the WANdisco LiveData Platform, we could turn the lightbulb on for them, so to speak.

Before partnering with WANdisco, this telecom giant had a serious issue. The phenomenal 360-degree view that it provided its customers allowed them to understand each customer’s experience via network usage, call center interactions, billing experience and beyond. But the critical nature of this environment, along with data retention policies, was also mandating high availability requirements with near zero Recovery Point Objective and near zero Recovery Time Objective. So the company set up a second cluster as a Disaster Recovery site.

They now had two environments going at once, and needed a solution that would meet the requirements for an enterprise class service level agreement, utilizing both production and data retention at the same time. And they needed to maintain consistency at all costs.

They tried the obvious tools native to the Hadoop stack like DistCp and Cloudera BDR, but none could handle the scale of data growth and daily change rates. The search was still on to find a viable solution.

Their Eureka! moment came with the integration of WANdisco’s LiveData Platform which supports active-active Hadoop data replication across multiple distributed and diverse IT environments regardless of geographic location, Hadoop distribution or cloud storage. This was precisely the solution that they needed. LiveData Plane leverages WANdisco’s patented Distributed Coordination Engine to utilize consensus to ensure continuous availability and consistency of actively used data across any combination of Hadoop distributions and cloud storage.

They were searching for a solution inside the box. WANdisco showed them that sometimes the most elegant and fitting solutions require a simple shift of focus.