NEWS Coverage

WANdisco launches its LiveData Platform for Azure

June 10 2020

WANdisco announced the launch of their Live Data Platform for Azure, aimed at data consistency across on-prem and cloud environments. They aim to aim to address five major types of cloud migration to Azure while also facing challenges like data consistency.

David Richards, founder, chairman and CEO of WANdisco spoke to MSDW about development behind the launch, working in the Microsoft channel, and what interests the company is trying to answer in the market.

Shifting operational data

WANdisco identifies five major types of cloud migrations including one-way migrations, hybrid data estate, disaster recovery, backup and cloud-burst. One of the solutions in the platform is the LiveData Plane for Azure, which coordinates data so that it can remain in operation with critical apps while being transferred into Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Richards explained:

Our distributed Coordination Engine powers this ability to maintain global consistency between locations. On-premises to cloud is easy. [But when you have] 30 different data centers, 30,000 workers worldwide and millions of transactions, at scale [coordination] is incredibly important.

Thousands of apps often end up trapped in a hybrid cloud reality, with data split between a set on-prem and in the cloud. So far, WANdisco is supporting customers in this phase, as well as those doing non-blocking movement of data from on-prem to cloud. A third phase for many organizations is multi-cloud and WANdisco is gearing up to support that as well, supporting more endpoints and hierarchical data structures for moves to data lakes.

Working with Microsoft and customers

After doing deals with Microsoft in the past, Richards sees the company's decision to embed WANdisco for data lake migrations as based on strategic considerations. He told MSDW:

It's the first time where Microsoft embedded a third-party application, with the same rights as a first-party offering. For companies that want to migrate, they can do it seamlessly even with operational data in regular business operations. It's clearly highly strategic for customers and Microsoft, taking this data first strategy, originally thought of as an application first approach. Without data, applications are pretty useless. [But with this, users can] run applications across datasets…Microsoft customers can use existing way of billing, discoverable through Azure portal.

On the subject of billing, he explained that WANdisco used to license its software based on the volume of data. But now that the company is "part of the fabric of the cloud," it is shifting to metered billing, with a variety of different pricing options. As a result, the company is not implementing charges on less than 25 TB of data.

For many people that seems like a colossal amount of data, but we're now seeing multi-petabyte data moves. Meters could be different vectors, like the number of processes, amount of data or time the product use. [Our goal is to] bring the price down.

Van Diamandakis, SVP of Marketing at WANdisco added:

It's a massive competition between cloud vendors to win the war of getting on-prem database into the cloud. Exabytes of data is trapped in Hadoop on-prem. Fearful companies tried migrating to cloud. They moved sedentary data but operational data is harder. [WANdisco] gives an easy way to move data. [A retailer we worked with it had failed in a previous attempt]. We did it in 70 days, transferring 3.5 petabytes. We're making the impossible possible and now it's drop dead easy.

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