WANdisco
WAND]

In a world of ubiquitous data, organizations are often required to conduct an intelligent analysis of their datasets, to uncover unexpected insights, transformative discoveries, and life-changing solutions. This helps enterprises to drive revenue and also enhance business efficiency. It was a decade ago that a group of students from the University of Washington, developed an open-source framework, to store and process big data across clusters of computers using simple programming models called ‘Apache Hadoop’. With a similar goal, leveraging their in-depth experience in the software industry, David Richards and his team, imagined a world of complete shared storage, and worked towards building a heterogeneous landscape. This ideated to the inception of Wide Area Network Distributed Computing (WANdisco) [LSE:WAND], a provider of enterprise-ready, non-stop software solutions to mitigate data management obstacles.

Befitting the name, ‘the firm’s technology works across the Wide Area Network (WAN) and Local Area Network (LAN), to provide organizations with LAN-speed performance, global load balancing, and business continuity. This ensures non-stop uptime, speeds up cycles, brings products to market faster and lowers overall development costs. “We deliver products that serve crucial high availability (HA) requirements, including Hadoop Big Data and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM),” says Richards, President, CEO, and Co- Founder, WANdisco.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) predictions, the Hadoop software market will completely drive the big data market, which in turn will increase its worth to over $23 billion by the end of this year. Based at San Ramon, CA, the firm’s WANdisco fusion platform delivers core functionality, which guarantees data consistency across clusters deployed on a combination of Hadoop distributions, Hadoop compatible storage systems, or cloud environments. The platform is deployed as a proxy server with each cluster, enabling users and applications to directly connect to Fusion, instead of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

WANdisco Fusion is non-invasive, requiring no modifications to Hadoop’s source code.

We deliver products that serve crucial high availability (HA) requirements, including Hadoop Big Data and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

“It helps users to update their Hadoop infrastructure without impacting their application availability or having to copy massive amounts of data once the update is done,” articulates Richards. Fusion is a platform that can be implemented across mixed storage environments, like Oracle BDA, IBM Big Insights, Cloudera, Hortonworks, EMC, and MapR.

Several companies have adopted WANdisco’s solution after shifting to Hadoop, to streamline their existing service activation system, previously spread across multiple applications and databases. In one instance, a US based life insurance firm faced difficulty in complying with the strict regulatory and business requirements to manage their multiple data centers. The customer required a large IT staff dedicated to support Hadoop, and a solution to easily administer with automated disaster recovery to eliminate downtime and data loss. “After an extensive evaluation, the Insurance client selected Fusion, which helped them eliminate Hadoop downtime and data loss, and avoid Hadoop vendor lock-in,” extols Richards.

WANdisco recently expanded its Fusion system to a whole new data center by migrating to a new Hadoop distribution, to avoid the downtime and business disruption these activities normally entail. “By doing so, the Fusion platform turned to be an independent architecture and has a newly built ability to work seamlessly in customer’s new environment,” says Richards. Spurring innovation, Richard and his team in the years to come will continue to build newer versions of the Fusion platform, focused on reducing the existing data challenges of secure storage, scalability, and availability.