WANDisco has developed and patented DConE, its own blockchain technology that they can use today to keep data consistent across multiple clouds, and which they plan to be able to eventually use to manage distributed blockchain environments as well.
Joel Horwitz, WANDisco’s SVP of Strategic Marketing
WANdisco has announced the expansion of their WANdisco Fusion distributed computing platform for enterprises, with LiveData for MultiCloud. It uses DConE, a patented, high-performance blockchain technology they developed themselves. LiveData for MultiCloud addresses the growing challenge of keeping data available and consistent across multiple cloud environments by being able to continuously replicate petabyte scale data without downtime.
WANDisco – the latter part of the name is an acronym for distributed computing – has been around since 2005.
“Our core business is our patented distributed network,” said Joel Horwitz, WANDisco’s SVP of Strategic Marketing. “We have applied that to numerous digital assets. We started out replicating code in the pre-GitHub days and we still have a thriving business there. In 2010, when Big Data entered the scene we recognized a need to replicate large scale data across Hadoop clusters. With this release, we will be able to copy data not just across Hadoop clusters, but also across cloud buckets.”
WANDisco received a patent this year for DConE, [Distributed Coordination Engine] the blockchain part of the solution.
“DConE is a consensus algorithm which allows us to replicate and create a record across the WAN – not just a centralized network – while still looking like a single server,” Horwitz said. “It creates a gold record of data that is currently under management and what is being changed, and lets us distribute and coordinate files across a WAN. It allows an Active-Active environment for replication with no bottlenecks or single points of failure.” The new offering adds support for all major cloud object storage services, including AWS S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, and Google Cloud Storage. That’s a first for WANDisco.
While the Blockchain component is the secret sauce that lets enterprises keep data consistent across multiple cloud environments, Horwitz said that it has further potential which has not yet been realized, but which is on their roadmap.
“It is still very much in research and development,” Horwitz explained. “What we offer with LiveData for MultiCloud is the ability to create a truly distributed data environment across multiple clouds, Hadoop clusters and eventually, across distributed blockchains.”
The partner play here is through large strategic vendor partners, although one of those is Microsoft, and WANDisco received Elite Co-sell status through the Microsoft One Commercial Partner Program this year.
“For the channel generally – and for this specifically – we tend to focus primarily on big strategic partners like IBM and Microsoft,” Horwitz indicated. “IBM has made a big bet on Hyperledger. So has Amazon. Our position with blockchain will be to work hand in glove with those bigger strategic partners first. We start out by OEMing our technology with them with them, then add the longer tail of VARs and MSPs. That is what we did with our source code management and Hadoop. But we didn’t put a lot of wood behind it then. We will offer online learning to embed our technology, and competitive pricing for them to include our technology.”
WANDisco thinks that DConE will really take off as they develop the ability to use a distributed blockchain.
“The channel struggles to build a product for cloud, blockchain and AI, and struggles to manage support across all that.” Horwitz said. “They should consider us. We let them write once and copy many times across these environments. That’s the biggest pain point we solve for the channel.”
