WANdisco's latest offering uses consensus technology, a key component of blockchain, to manage data across multi-cloud enterprise environments.
Consensus technology is used to reach agreement on a single data value between processes or distributed systems. These algorithms are also at the heart of many blockchain technologies. WANdisco in December obtained a blockchain patent for its consent technology, called Distributed Coordination Engine (DConE).
"Our technology solves a very difficult problem of having a way to make consensus spread across a geographic network, not just a centralized network," said Joel Horwitz, senior vice president of marketing at WANdisco. "This is the essence of our company."
It turns out that this technology is also very useful in multi-cloud deployments.
LiveData for MultiCloud
So WANdisco used DConE (pronounced DEE-cone) for its new multi-cloud management capabilities in its Fusion distributed processing platform. DConE powers the platform. And the new feature, called LiveData for MultiCloud, offers replication, uniformity and access to data, all in real time, through the cloud. It also performs huge data migrations on a zettabyte scale. This means that you do not need to manually create snapshots or send data in a physical box like Amazon Web Services Snowball or Google & # 39; s Transfer Appliance to move huge amounts of data to the cloud.
LiveData for MultiCloud uses consensus technology to maintain the perception of a single server system running at LAN speeds, but in a distributed environment where servers can be thousands of miles away. It supports all major cloud storage services, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, Microsoft Azure Blob and Google Cloud Storage.
"It's the only platform that allows continuous replication of petabyte scale data with zero data loss and zero downtime across multiple cloud environments," said Horwitz, adding that he recently asked an analyst why not more companies use blockchain to manage data through clouds. "His answer was, in essence, that the blockchains that exist today do not have enough throughput," Horwitz said. "The short answer: simply because it is not very difficult to do".
Who is WANdisco?
WANdisco CEO David Richards and Chief Scientist Yeturu Aahlad co-founded the company in the United Kingdom in 2005. They cultivated without raising private equity funds, venture capital or angel and took him to the London Stock Exchange in June 2012. The initial public offering has raised more than $ 24 million.
The company now has a double office in San Ramon, Calif., And Sheffield, England. He says hundreds of corporate customers, including Daimler, AMD, Cisco, and Morgan Stanley, use their Fusion business software with DConE for source code management, disaster recovery of big data, and data center migrations.
The company also works with all major cloud service providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM, Alibaba Cloud and Oracle. This includes an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with IBM, which resells WANdisco Fusion renamed as IBM's Big Replicate and is an embedded component of the IBM Big Data, cloud and analytics products.
IBM, Alibaba OEM Agreements
In fact, Horwitz appoints IBM as the main competitor of WANdisco. "That's why we have partnered with them," he said. "You can either chase them, collaborate with them, or try to get them out of business, and we choose to work with IBM instead of putting them out of business."
The company obtained a second major OEM sales agreement with Alibaba Cloud last year.
"We are incorporated as a standard component in Alibaba Cloud, so it's kind of a big deal," said Horwitz. "We are quite invasive in the stack, in the sense that we are really reading the courage of the files to make sure we only replicate the data we need."
While native cloud backup tools and data transfer boxes include WANdisco's main competitors, Horwitz says that no. 2 of the list consists of data management software companies such as Veeam, which is "a big one", he added. "But they're more focused on application data, terabytes instead of petabytes."