WANdisco is tackling cloud migration challenges

This article was originally published in the Spring 2019 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox. 

Shifting large-scale data sets to the Microsoft Azure cloud can represent a huge challenge. The migration may require extended production downtime and, once on the cloud platform, the migrated data is almost by definition, out-of-date and inconsistent. 

To overcome these challenges, Microsoft Azure has partnered with WANdisco to help businesses avoid both downtime and data consistency challenges associated with migrating large, fast-changing data sets to the cloud. Powered by WANdisco’s distributed coordination engine, WANdisco Fusion offers a new approach to protecting Hadoop and object store data with continuous replication that works in any mixed Hadoop and object storage environment.

Some of the world’s largest global brands have already harnessed the Azure and WANdisco partnership. For example, when semiconductor company AMD aimed to create a disaster recovery environment in the cloud to protect its mission­critical manufacturing applications, it could not afford a second of downtime. By deploying the WANdisco Fusion platform, AMD successfully replicated a massive data set to an Azure Data Box with no impact on its production environment. After shipping the Azure Data Box to Microsoft and completing the upload to Azure, AMD deployed WANdisco Fusion to update and synchronize the migrated data, ensuring full data consistency between the source and cloud data sets.

AMD continues to rely on WANdisco Fusion to ensure that data in the on-premises and cloud environments is always consistent, guaranteeing seamless business continuity and no data loss in the event of an outage. WANdisco calls this a ‘LiveData strategy.’ 

AMD isn’t the only business to de-risk its journey to the cloud by becoming a LiveData company. In another example, a major US grocery chain aimed to enhance the accuracy of its group reporting processes but maintaining data consistency between an acquired subsidiary’s and its own systems was proving hard to manage. By deploying WANdisco Fusion, the retailer automatically replicates source data to its central systems without impacting the subsidiary’s operations. In this scenario, the subsidiary retains control over its local systems and production, while commercial data is replicated to the head office – helping it to drive ­better-informed strategic decisions via more resilient and accurate analytics capabilities.

By guaranteeing zero disruption during Azure data migrations, WANdisco Fusion empowers organisations to become LiveData companies regardless of their global data footprint and IT environment.