The technology approach taken by software vendor WANdisco Inc. recognizes an important shift that has taken place in the enterprise computing world. Much as the internet-transformed global connectivity, where business can be conducted anytime and anywhere in the world, that same trend has impacted how organizations view data. Information needs to be reliable and available wherever it may reside.

In a world where data might be stored in multiple locations, on-premises or in the cloud, that’s no easy task. The solution requires a different view of how information has been backed-up and accessed in the past, which is precisely why WANdisco built its software solution on a simple, five-word mantra: “consistent data spanning platforms everywhere.”

The company has championed its concept of “live data,” — the notion that if one data center goes down, a business can still write crucial applications against its dataset without loss of work. This requires a different mindset when viewing how data is handled in the infrastructure, one where primary and backup are not part of the mental picture.

“Regular backup and disaster recovery are really inadequate to fuel your digital transformation,” said Jagane Sundar (pictured), chief technology officer of WANdisco, who described a system where each replica of data is equal to all of the others. “You can write to any of these, you can run your analytics against any of those. Once you get past that mental hurdle, what you’ve got is the freedom to innovate.”

Sundar spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE’s roving news desk, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss WANdisco’s “live data platform,” partnerships with cloud providers, the evolution of the elastic infrastructure, and how networks of data are transforming enterprise computing. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the first part of the CUBE Conversation video with Jagane Sundar below:

Fusion platform drives data access

Central to WANdisco’s approach is its Fusion “live data” platform, a Hadoop-compatible file system that powers access to data across multiple clusters and distributions. Because data still has to be stored somewhere, Fusion is designed to facilitate data governance and localized management, regardless of where the information resides.

“[Fusion] helps you conform to legal requirements and the locality of data,” Sundar said. “I can start building applications that are in the critical business path because I’m confident of the availability of my data, the fact that we comply with all regulatory concerns. It was built with such a thing in mind.”

One key to WANdisco’s strategy is its ability to provide a cross-platform enterprise solution. The company has been actively inking agreements with major cloud providers over the past year.

These partnerships include the integration of Fusion with Microsoft Azure HDInsight, the launch of a hybrid data lake architecture with Amazon Web Services Inc., an original equipment manufacturer agreement with Alibaba Cloud, and certification to meet Oracle Corp.’s maximum availability standards.

“We enable [customers] to have consistent replicas of their data across multiple regions of cloud vendors,” Sundar said. “They don’t worry about what data they’re going to use … resources are truly elastic now. It’s opening up possibilities they never had before.”

Rise of ‘plastic infrastructure’

While infrastructure resources for customers are becoming more “elastic,” they are also becoming “plastic,” as in being able to rapidly respond to workload needs while keeping the same shape. This concept where the elastic infrastructure evolves into a plastic one based on cloud-based operations has been defined by Wikibon analysts who envision the approach as instrumental in speeding the delivery of customer-facing systems.

WANdisco’s chief technical officer believes that the rise of the plastic infrastructure validates his firm’s system, which enables the invention of new ideas and more sophisticated applications without having to worry about the availability or consistency of data.

“The fact that we can replicate across different clouds is important for plastic infrastructure,” Sundar explained. “We love this notion that we take the chief information officer’s problems and mundane data management away and introduce the capability to invent and innovate in their space.”

Focus on ‘networks of data’

The changing nature of the big data infrastructure also means that networks are being redefined in different terms. As data becomes king, devices and web pages take a back seat to the relationship between sources and sinks of information, a transformation that Wikibon has also characterized as an emerging trend labeled “networks of data.”

In these networks, the ability to comprehend usage patterns and place data where it is needed most becomes the paramount service model. This is the model that WANdisco is clearly facilitating.

“If one of those locations goes down, it’s a non-event,” Sundar said. “You can continue reading and writing from the other locations. That truly makes the first step towards building this ‘network of data’ feasible.”

WANdisco’s model recognizes that cloud computing is reshaping the data landscape. The cloud is where application developers and big data users gather because that’s where the action is.

“People need to stop thinking about machines and servers and consider this as infrastructure that they acquire from different cloud vendors,” Sundar said. “Now you have the ability to build applications in completely different worlds, and that’s very interesting to us.”

Watch the second part of the video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: WANdisco Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither WANdisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE