WANdisco ships blockchain-driven LiveData for MultiCloud DR

WANdisco is using blockchain technology to make data dance in time across clouds.

The vendor has made its LiveData for MultiCloud replication software generally available. LiveData incorporates WANdisco's patented blockchain Distributed Coordination Engine (DConE) technology to keep data synchronized across clouds. This results in what the vendor described as LAN-like speeds, even when servers are thousands of miles apart, aiding cloud migration, replication and disaster recovery (DR).

Merv Adrian, research vice president of data and analytics at Gartner, said WANdisco is counting on its promised speed to stand out among products that use a distributed ledger to maintain consensus across clouds.

"It's fair to say they are able to deliver the ability to replicate data seamlessly, globally, with very little latency and very high availability and assurance," Adrian said. "And they've got customers with whom they have been doing all that."

Adrian said multi-cloud DR is a valuable capability in this age of government regulations. He said the General Data Protection Regulation and other compliance laws force organizations to keep certain data local, but they still need to access that data quickly. This plays exactly into what LiveData for MultiCloud and DConE are designed to do.

"It feels as though the market is coming in their direction," Adrian said. "More people are going to care about multi-cloud, partly because of the network capabilities, but also because of the availability of products that run in multiple places. An infrastructure that supports that is a big deal."

Joel Horwitz, senior vice president of marketing at WANdisco, based in San Ramon, Calif., said customers already used the vendor's DConE-powered Fusion platform for data migrations and disaster recovery between data center environments. LiveData for MultiCloud pushed those capabilities into multiple clouds.

It feels as though the market is coming in their direction. More people are going to care about multi-cloud.

"What we are seeing from customers is that they are absolutely moving their big data environments to the cloud -- and at an alarming pace," Horwitz said. "We want to get ahead of the conversation in that regard."

WANdisco started in 2005 with its DConE consensus algorithm, which the vendor's early customers used for managing and backing up source code. WANdisco launched its Fusion platform in 2010, allowing customers to back up, recover and migrate data across Hadoop environments. The Fusion platform has expanded beyond Hadoop since then, and this latest WANdisco news expands DConE's capabilities to Azure Blob, Google Cloud, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage and AWS S3 environments.

WANdisco boasts several big-name customers, such as Electronic Arts and Vanguard.

"They've been at this for a while," Adrian said of WANdisco. "They do have high-level customers they can point to, and they're very well-positioned for a market that's about to get a lot hotter."