Data replication specialist WANdisco Inc. is integrating its Fusion product with Amazon Web Services’ Snowball and Snowmobile products that move huge amounts of data physically to Amazon cloud data centers, in a bid to ensure that transactional data can still be used and updated even when it’s literally in transit.

Fusion is WANdisco’s main data replication technology, designed to manage and transmit transactional data from different sources to multiple destinations. It’s used by companies to ensure that data remains consistent across different data centers scattered across the world.

AWS Snowball and Snowmobile (pictured) are essentially huge physical storage units used by companies to move massive amounts of data into Amazon’s cloud that would otherwise take weeks to upload over the Internet. Users simply upload data into the Snowball or Snowmobile before it’s trucked to one of Amazon’s data centers, where it can be uploaded to the public cloud giant’s servers much more quickly.

By integrating Fusion with the data transit products, companies can continue using data sets that are on the way to or from Amazon’s data centers.

Fusion is powered by WANdisco’s distributed Paxos algorithm, which ensures that any updates to the data set are agreed upon and recorded in the order they occur. What this means is that when the data reaches its destination, updates can be applied to the dataset in the correct sequence, so it remains consistent with its original source.

So for example, if a bank wants to ship a ton of data to Amazon’s facilities, it can do so using the Snowball service. During transit, that data, assuming it’s also stored on the bank’s own servers, can still be used and updated. Once the Snowball arrives and the data set is uploaded to Amazon’s servers, any updates during the intervening period will also be recorded.

This is important because in the case of a bank, it needs to ensure the data is recorded in the correct sequence so its systems don’t accidentally mix up any transactions. For example, if a customer receives a deposit of $1 million and later sends that $1 million to another account, it’s necessary that the deposit is recorded first so the customer’s account balance isn’t flagged as going into the red. If that happened, the bank’s systems might automatically suspend the account, even though the client did nothing wrong.

The Register, which first reported the news ahead of the official release next month, said Fusion’s integration with AWS Snowball and Snowmobile will become a core part of the product, rather than a separate service.

Photo: Robert Hof