WANdisco Acquires San Francisco-Based Big Data Company OhmData

WANdisco Plc, provider of enterprise-ready, non-stop software solutions that enable globally distributed organizations to meet data challenges of secure storage, scalability and availability, announced the acquisition of San Francisco-based OhmData Inc.

OhmData is a developer of Apache HBase database solutions. HBase is a core component of the Hadoop stack designed for real-time R/W processing of large-scale data sets, and is used in mission-critical applications at companies such as Facebook and Bloomberg.

WANdisco recently applied its continuous availability technology to HBase and the OhmData team will continue this work to enhance WANdisco’s big data product portfolio. In addition to its work with HBase, OhmData has a patent-pending that addresses efficient database server power consumption.

OhmData was co-founded by Alex Newman and RyanRawson, who will join WANdisco as part of the acquisition.

Newman is an open source Hadoop committer who has worked in big data, network protocol design, software security and application development. He also worked on HBase at Cloudera. He is a Core Committer on the Apache HBase open source project and a member of the HBase Project Management Committee.

Before co-founding OhmData, Rawson was a software engineer at Google, where he worked on Google’s ‘Big Table’ forerunner to HBase, and Amazon, where he developed synchronous cross-data center applications. He specializes in large distributed systems.

Working alongside WANdisco’s big data and distributed computing experts such as Dr. Yeturu Aahlad, Dr. Konstantin Shvachko, Dr. Konstantin Boudnik and Jagane Sundar, they will enhance WANdisco’s ability to develop new technology. Their status as senior open source committers who can contribute to Hadoop’s code base will further improve integration between WANdisco’s products and the Hadoop platform.

Gartner analysts Merv Adrian and Nick Heudecker see HBase and other additional components as key to the relevance of Hadoop and comment: “As Hadoop core and related projects have progressed, its viability as a platform has been enhanced and substantial numbers of vendors in multiple categories, such as business analytics, data integration and workload management, have introduced products that assume its presence. Version 2.x of Apache Hadoop enables greater scalability and availability and expands beyond its batch processing roots to encompass new workloads and processing styles.”

David Richards, CEO, WANdisco, comments: “We have again demonstrated that WANdisco can attract the top talent in the industry. Alex and Ryan come to us having worked as core technologists at some of the biggest names in the industry such as Google, Cloudera and Amazon. HBase is a critical component of the Hadoop stack and customers have told us that they need it to be continuously available. We are delighted to have added the OhmData team to our renowned Hadoop organization.“