WANdisco and Microsoft Announce LiveData Cloud Services for Azure
By Van Diamandakis
Jun 01, 2020
In real estate, turnkey homes take all the stress off the buyer, allowing them to sign the paperwork, unlock the front door, and immediately move into a finished, livable space, much like an Airbnb.
And now, data lake cloud migration projects, once considered to be as difficult, risky and time consuming as teardowns and rebuilds in the construction industry, have been given the “easy button,” allowing enterprises driving digital transformation to move their petabyte-scale on-premises data and applications to the cloud in a simple, automated and risk free method with zero business downtime, unlocking digital transformation projects, cost savings and machine learning powered cloud analytics.
WANdisco and Microsoft today have engineered an industry first. WANdisco has become the first independent software vendor to be natively integrated into Azure, delivering petabyte and extabyte scale data migration services for Microsoft customers with the same experience, integrated security, billing and management, and as broadly accessible as Azure compute, networking and storage. Today we announced the preview availability of WANdisco Live Data Cloud Services for Azure, a new Azure-native set of service offerings available exclusively on Microsoft Azure. WANdisco offers a welcome boost as a push-button capability for data migration and replication featuring WANdisco’s patented distributed consensus engine, which uniquely solves for permission blockchain, enabling applications to continue to operate while constantly changing business critical data is migrating and replicating. Data consistency, accuracy and accessibility is ensured, regardless of the environment — on-premises, hybrid, hybrid cloud, multi-region or multi-cloud.
WANdisco LiveData Cloud Services are fully integrated in the Azure Portal, Azure CLI, and Azure Marketplace. Billing is also headache-free: customers will have the same seamless billing experience through Azure Billing they have with other native Azure services.
WANdisco is announcing the first two of many service offerings available exclusively on the WANdisco LiveData Platform – LiveData Migrator for Azure and LiveData Plane for Azure. Taken together, LiveData Migrator for Azure and LiveData Plane for Azure create a consistent, uninterrupted communication loop for active-active data plane consistency between a company’s Big Data Hadoop environment located on-premises and in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. The system eliminates all delays and downtime with LiveData Migrator performing an initial scan and then immediately feeding its detailed picture into LiveData Plane, which captures and communicates any changes (updates, creates and deletes) from that point forward.
Hadoop integration
For customers who intend to have at least some Hadoop assets in Azure for the foreseeable future, LiveData Plane for Azure is ready. The system fully integrates with managed Hadoop environments, such as Azure HDInsights, and with the Live High plugin, customers can take comfort in the fact that their operational metastores are kept in sync during changes within the hybrid data plane.
Data Lake Migration Patterns
Every enterprise has its own reasons, strategies and personal timeline for digital transformation. But regardless of the motivations or desired outcomes, data lake migration patterns generally fall into one of five scenarios:
One-Way Migration
Organizations intending to complete their on-premise migration (lift-and-shift or re-platform) inside a 12 to 18-month window but will begin to make investments into standing up cloud-native solutions now to mitigate incurring future tech debt.
Hybrid Data Estate
Enterprises intending to maintain on-premise 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.
Disaster Recovery
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.
Together, LiveData Migrator for Azure and LiveData Plane for Azure equalize all five migration and replication scenarios with equal strength. LiveData Plane for Azure also effectively 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. LiveData Plane for Azure addresses concerns such as maintaining business continuity while changes occur, ensuring that all data is transmitted securely over the wire, and matching or exceeding the same data integrity levels once that data lands in ADLS Gen2.
With its turnkey deployment and no downtime, customers can recoup their data and analytics investments sooner by reducing the data engineering and migration costs (the lion’s share of most on-premise migrations) by orders of magnitude. With LiveData Plane for Azure, customers are freed to invest in next-gen trends such as augmented analytics and ubiquitous data governance native in the public cloud.
No longer do customers need to take on the risk of long, expensive and risky data lake migration projects for their business critical data under active daily change. According to the 2019 Standish report, over 80% of these projects are over budget and suffer delays, and 20% completely fail. Today, Microsoft customers can accelerate their digital transformation into the cloud, modernizing data and applications with the WANdisco easy button, much like walking into a new home, fully furnished, with a stocked refrigerator and ready to enjoy.
For more information and an opportunity to qualify for our Private Preview customer program, please click here
About the author
Van Diamandakis, SVP of Marketing, WANdisco
Van is a proven Silicon Valley technology executive with over 25 years of operational experience that draws upon his track record leading global marketing transformations, driving to meaningful financial events including IPOs and acquisitions. Van has been at the forefront of B2B technology marketing and brings a unique ability to marry creativity, data, technology and leadership skills to rapidly build brand equity and successfully navigate tech companies through inflection points, accelerating revenue growth and valuation.
