WANdisco PLC and Snowflake Inc. today said that they’re joining forces to help enterprises move information from their on-premises Hadoop clusters into Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse.

Publicly traded WANdisco develops data management products. Last year, it launched a tool called LiveData Migrator that’s specifically geared toward moving information from in-house Hadoop deployments to the public cloud. LiveData Migrator is the focus of the new partnership with Snowflake.

Released in 2003, Hadoop is an open-source data crunching framework that was at one point the go-to platform for enterprise analytics projects. Many organizations built their on-premises analytics environments atop the framework. Over time, however, enterprise technology priorities have changed, and a growing number of big firms are migrating Hadoop workloads to cloud-native platforms such as Snowflake.

The new partnership will see WANdisco bring LiveData Migrator to Snowflake’s data warehouse to ease data migrations for joint customers. The companies say the alliance will help speed up their customers’ cloud initiatives.

Normally, because of Hadoop’s complexity, companies must make extensive technical changes to their  deployments before they can start exporting data. That increases cloud migrations’ duration and makes the process more error-prone. WANdisco’s LiveData Migrator can move data to Snowflake without requiring major configuration changes, which the company says reduces the risk of technical mistakes while removing the need to hire specialists.

The tool also provides other features to ease data transfers. It exports information without blocking file system activity, meaning workers who rely on the records in a Hadoop cluster can keep accessing it while the migration is ongoing. They can even change the records, in which case LiveData Migrator will synchronize the modifications to Snowflake along with the rest of the data. 

“Snowflake is seeing increased demand from enterprises seeking to migrate Hadoop workloads to Snowflake’s Data Cloud,” said WANdisco Chief Executive David Richards. “With this partnership, enterprises have a powerful option to move their organization to the cloud.”

The partnership will allow WANdisco to provide better support for companies adopting Snowflake’s platform, a segment that represents a large and growing market. Snowflake, which is worth more than $64 billion, saw revenue more than double last quarter thanks to surging demand from enterprises.

WANdisco previously partnered with Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to certify LiveData Migrator for their respective clouds. 

From Snowflake’s standpoint, technology partnerships allow it to complement the features of its data warehouse with partner-developed products. That helps provide a more compelling overall value proposition for enterprises.

Data migration is a particularly big priority in the cloud ecosystem because it heavily influences how easily customers can adopt a new service. That’s why AWS, Microsoft and Google LLC each offer multiple solutions designed to ease the task of migrating workloads to their clouds. 

Photo: WANdisco