WANdisco PLC today launched LiveData Migrator, a product it says enables companies to move data in on-premises Hadoop clusters to the cloud with considerably less hassle than what the process normally involves.

San Ramon, California-based WANdisco provides software tools for automating the migration of business records between systems and related data management tasks. Its customers include Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Bosch GmbH, among others.

LiveData Migrator is designed to make it easier for companies to move data stored in on-premises Hadoop environments to Amazon Web Services. Hadoop is an open-source framework for processing large amounts of information that sits at the cornerstone of many enterprises’ on-premises data environments. Over recent years, more and more companies have started moving the data they store in the framework to the cloud.

According to WANdisco, LiveData Migrator overcomes several of the most common issues that hinder large-scale data migrations.

One of those issues is that moving large amounts of business information often requires making changes to the on-premises infrastructure from which the information is moved. Infrastructure changes, in turn, take time and effort, while also creating more potential for human errors. The company says LiveData Migrator can shift data to AWS without requiring any major modification to the configuration of a Hadoop cluster, the individual servers inside or the applications running on top.

Another issue WANdisco promises to address is downtime. In complex migrations, there are cases where administrators must temporarily prevent users from making changes to the records being moved so as to avoid data conflicts. This can disrupt the normal flow of work for days or weeks.

LiveData Migrator overcomes the challenge by using a homegrown technology that enables what WANdisco describes as nonblocking file system reads and writes. In other words, users who depend on the data being moved for their work can keep using it during the migration. Similarly, companies can start using the records they shift to the cloud before the migration finishes, which allows analytics projects to start sooner.

“Enterprises that want to move their data to the cloud but are concerned about the risks of doing so now have a powerful solution that’s self-service and extremely easy to use,” said WANdisco Chief Executive Officer David Richards.

WANdisco sees a big market opportunity ahead of it. The company, citing research from Gartner Inc., says that nearly 70% of enterprises have already started shifting data to the cloud but more than half of data migration initiatives are expected to exceed their target budgets and timelines through 2022. 

Image: WANdisco