“We gave [businesses] the ability to have strongly consistent, replicated versions of their data,” said Jagane Sundar, WANdisco plc chief technical officer, concerning his company’s role within in the industry.

During an interview at Hadoop Summit 2015, theCUBE’s John Furrier and George Gilbert joked with Sundar about the bet he won regarding whether the Big Data space is really bigger than Hadoop. Furrier made the point that Hadoop and data center are going mainstream; casual Internet users are interacting with it on a regular basis. Sundar expressed a passionate interest in working with “disparate storage environments” and declared WANdisco’s new direction on Hadoop to be cross-data center replication, storage and analytics.

The Hadoop use-case

Sundar described the effect of Hurricane Sandy as a situation wherein many businesses had data centers in Manhattan that could only withstand “five or 10 milliseconds of latency,”and back-up centers in New Jersey “were completely wiped out.” WANdisco responded by offering a solution that worked across any distance, which made “a big hit for the Hadoop use-case at that point.” After that, Sundar recalled, “We started looking at extending our platform beyond Hadoop.”

WANdisco offers improved compute space in which a user simply submits a job, and then the program finds out where the data is available, where the compute capacity is, runs it, and provides the results “without having to do specific things.” Other features “include NFS, SPIF, and other storage protocols into our replication system,” Sundar said, noting that “replication will be automated with our system, which you can run analytics on top of that.”

Looking forward, Sundar is developing “running database technologies across multiple data center [locations]” to “get consistent answers,” a process Sundar referred to as globally distributed RDBMS capability, calling it “the final frontier.” Otherwise, Sundar mentioned, “all of the engineering education” goes into network capability.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Hadoop Summit 2015.