WANdisco LiveData Platform for Petabyte Scale Cloud Migration to Microsoft Azure

WANdisco, Inc. announced the limited public preview availability of LiveData Platform for Azure, a service offering available on Microsoft Azure exclusively.

The LiveData Platform features the company’s patented consensus engine which ensures data consistency, accuracy, and accessibility across any environment, be it on-premises, hybrid (on-premises and cloud), hybrid cloud, multi-region or multi-cloud. In short, enterprises looking to migrate their on-premises data lake to the cloud, may now turn to the LiveData Platform on Azure for a turnkey data migration solution with zero business downtime.

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Customers are able to leverage this new service and continue to enjoy the same seamless experience they have already with their existing Azure experience. The LiveData Platform services are integrated in the Azure Customer Portal, Azure CLI, and Azure Marketplace. Customers will have the same seamless billing experience through Azure Billing as they have with other native Azure services.

The company is also announcing two service offerings available on the LiveData Platform – LiveData Migrator for Azure and LiveData Plane for Azure. They work in conjunction to establish an active-active data plane consistency between an enterprise’s big data Hadoop environment located on-premises and in Azure Data Lake Storage. LiveData Migrator performs the initial bootstrapping through a one-time scan, and then feeds that into LiveData Plane to ensure that any changes (creates, updates, and deletes) are immediately captured after that point.

Additionally, LiveData Plane for Azure integrates with managed Hadoop environments such as Azure HDInsight. The Hive plug-in keeps operational meta stores in sync with changes that occur on the data plane, thereby ensuring end to end consistency.

Enterprises have either already embarked on their digital transformation journey or they plan to very soon.

The reasons are unique to each organization, however, the data lake migration pattern usually falls into one of these scenario buckets:

• One-way migration
  Organizations intending to complete their on-premises migration (lift-and-shift or re-platform) inside a 12-18 month window, but will begin to make investments into standing up cloud-native solutions now to mitigate incurring future technical debt.

• Hybrid data estate
  Enterprises intending to maintain on-premises assets for the next several years, but still divert all new investments into cloud-native solutions for similar reasons as in a one-way migration.

• DR
  Using a public cloud to host their turnkey DR environment is a common entry point for some customers because of the immediate cost savings observed when decommissioning an environment they hope they never have to use, but are obliged to have one should the need occur.

• Backup
  Taking advantage of well-priced and boundless storage capacity.

• Cloud-Burst
  Enabling enterprises to access compute and storage in the cloud when required rather than building infrastructure for peak capacity.

LiveData Migrator for Azure and Plane for Azure together address all 5 migration scenarios with ease and with equal strength and capabilities across all of them. Specifically with the one-way migration and hybrid data estate scenarios, customers are often challenged on how to approach a feat that appears insurmountable or at least rife with challenges both technical and logistical in nature. All too often, these very real concerns revolve around the challenges inherent to physically shifting the existing black hole, better known as data gravity, from one site to another.

LiveData Plane for Azure solves the data gravity problem at petabyte scale so that the enterprise can shift their intellectual capital towards the other components of their digital transformation journey. It addresses concerns such as maintaining BC while changes occur, ensuring that all data is transmitted securely, and matching or exceeding the same data integrity levels once that data lands in Azure Data Lake Storage. With its turnkey deployment and no downtime, customers are able to recoup their data and analytics investments sooner by reducing the data engineering and migration costs (the lion’s share of most on-premises migrations) by orders of magnitude. With LiveData Plane for Azure, customers are now free to invest in next-gen trends such as augmented analytics and ubiquitous data governance native in the public cloud.

In collaboration with Microsoft Corp. and Infosys Ltd., the company conducted a private preview with customers, and reviews have been outstanding. This initial success has led to momentum in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.

“WANdisco technology provides a unique platform to migrate ‘live’ data at scale into and within Azure without business disruption,” said Satish HC, EVP, data and analytics, Infosys Ltd.”We have proven its capabilities in a multi-petabyte scale customer environment. The native integration with Azure simplifies deployment and makes LiveData Migrator for Azure the primary choice in live data migration scenarios. We look forward to working closely with WANdisco in the future to capitalize on the migration opportunity.“

“We are excited to be launching a new service in Microsoft Azure,” said David Richards, CEO and chairman, WANdisco. “The LiveData Platform service along with LiveData Migrator for Azure and LiveData Plane for Azure offerings are the culmination of joint engineering work between WANdisco and Microsoft with the objective of creating a new service offering built around data movement and data consistency. These are just the first and we plan to continue building more turnkey solutions. Customers are already seeing the benefits and we are excited to unlock this over $1B market opportunity we have with Microsoft. We are also excited to be the first ISV to be launching a new Azure-native service and play a key role in the ADLS Data Lake Migration Program.“

Tad Brockway, corporate VP, Azure storage, media and edge, Microsoft, added: “Customers have a significant opportunity to optimize costs and expand analytics and insights capabilities by moving their on-premises data lakes to the cloud. WANDisco LiveData Migrator and LiveData Plane are the first offerings to provide a fully integrated and turnkey experience for customers migrating Hadoop data into Azure Data Lake Storage seamlessly and without business disruption.“