WANdisco is locked, loaded, and ready to launch on-premises data to the cloud with its LiveData Migrator platform.

The new platform automates Hadoop data to the cloud at scale from on-premises data centers to Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to the vendor, LiveData Migrator makes big data migration secure and seamless with non-intrusive deployment, zero application downtime, or risk of data loss, even when data sets are under active change. 

WANdisco Founder and CEO David Richards explained that the ongoing pandemic is going to continue to drive data volumes that will be more geographically diverse as employees continue to work from home offices and kitchen tables. As a result, the cloud is becoming increasingly ubiquitous with telework.

“When we come out of this the world is going to be changed,” Richards said. “The competitive dynamics are going to be very different and I think most people now recognize this,” he added in explaining how the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms will become “key differentiators” for organizations that choose not to or can’t move to the cloud.  

“They’re going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage – that really, at the very heart of it, is the problem that WANdisco is solving,” he said.

Modern enterprises have billions of transactions and vast datasets that often ends up trapped in an unintentional hybrid purgatory – neither fully on-premises nor in the cloud. That’s because moving massive datasets with a traditional cloud migration method, such as transfer devices or distributed copy, is only viable if that data is static or archival, Richards explained. But if data is transactional and changing, businesses risk disrupting the operation of on-premises applications, losing data or data changes, and can incur costly overhead with manual checking and repeated scans in their migration to the cloud.

In the past, a migration could take months and would require blocking client activity and scheduled outages. When talking about moving into this new world of big data “we like to say small batch, small outage; big data, big outage,” Richards said in explaining how the method of migrating data has to change.  

“That is the problem that we've solved with LiveData Migrator,” he added.

And when it comes to Hadoop data, Richards explained “there's a reason that not many of those customers have managed to move to the cloud.” For starters, AWS and Microsoft Azure both struggle to move data lakes to that cloud, he added, creating “a huge opportunity” to move very large data lakes on premises to cloud.

Hadoop on-premises is quickly becoming a thing of the past, according to Richards. When Hadoop was first implemented it was for largely batch-based queries. “Now we're in a mishmash of batch-based processing and real-time analytics, all powered by the same dataset, but a different set of applications.” 

LiveData Migrator “can unlock all of those companies that are desperate to move their Hadoop clusters, get out of Hadoop and move it to the cloud.” It migrates Hadoop data to other Hadoop-compatible file systems and cloud storage, including the ongoing changes made to those data before, throughout, and after migration.

The product is available as a free trial for up to 5 terabytes.