A cloud giant and major player in active data replication teamed up this week to offer a new service that will replicate information at scale between on-premises and cloud environments. The technology allows Microsoft Azure customers to install WANdisco Fusion on an HDInsight cluster with a single click.

“If you’ve got some data assets, Hadoop or cloud object stores on-prem, and you want to create a Hadoop or cloud environment with Azure in picture, ours is the only way of doing it active/active,” said Jagane Sundar (pictured, left), chief technology officer at WANdisco PLC.

Sundar stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier) during the BigData NYC event in New York City. He was joined by Pranav Rastogi (pictured, right), program manager for Azure at Microsoft Corp., and they discussed how the new service will solve limitation problems in on-prem data centers and continue to fuel growing interest in moving more data and applications to the cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

By enabling WANdisco as an application on Azure HDInsight, customers can now use the active/active feature to have both environments (on-prem data center and Azure Cloud) running in sync. The goal is to solve limitation problems when nodes are set and workloads are running.

Experiment faster at a lower cost

“With offerings from WANdisco and Insight, once you move the data you can start spinning up clusters; you can start installing more open-source libraries,” Rastogi explained. “It will increase your efficiency, allow you to experiment faster, and reduce your cost as well because you no longer have to run the cluster all the time.”

The joint service offering reflects a growing desire among information technology managers to escape the locked environment of on-prem architectures and experiment with open-source libraries and specific technologies, such as artificial intelligence tools, that often sit on top of open-source-based big data software Hadoop or open-source data processing engine Spark.

“Almost all of our customers who have on-prem instances of Hadoop are considering cloud in one form or another,” Sundar said.

For Microsoft, the partnership with WANdisco is part of a continuing journey to provide customers with relief from the headaches of dealing with infrastructure demands, such as patching or installing OS updates. “They want to rely on Microsoft Azure to take care of it so they can focus on their application-specific logic or business-specific logic,” Rastogi concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData NYC 2017. (* Disclosure: WANdisco PLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither WANdisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE