Technology alliances are becoming increasingly important for WANdisco as it pursues a distribution-agnostic strategy to carve out a slice of the fiercely competitive Big Data market, CTO Jagane Sundar noted in a recent discussion on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE. Appearing alongside Saravana Krishnamurthy of Pivotal, the executive gave us with an in-depth view of his company’s relationship with the newest member of the EMC federation.

Sundar tells theCUBE host John Furrier that the partnership is mutually beneficial, with WANdisco’s Non-Stop disaster recovery and high-availability technology supporting Pivotal’s proprietary Hadoop platform. The software is also included in HAWQ, the EMC and VMware spinoff’s complementary SQL query engine.

Krishnamurthy explains that the engine is based on a parallel relational database optimized to run on top of HDFS, which he views as a “standard protocol” for storage-intensive workloads such as OLAP services and VoIP communications. Hadoop is a scalable and cost-effective framework for processing large volumes of data, Sundar adds, but it falls short of meeting enterprise reliability standards. That’s where WANdisco comes in.

“We provide protection against failure of single nodes within a data center, entire racks within a data center, or entire data centers themselves,” Sundar details. “Your application will be nonstop, there will be no interruption to your data availability. That’s something that enterprises have time and again asked us for, that’s the difference between Internet-scale operations in Yahoo or companies like that … versus some enterprise application use cases where things need to be up all the time.”

Elaborating, the executive says that Non-Stop employs up to seven NameNodes (metadata servers) per cluster to ensure uptime across geographically disparate deployments. Besides improving data availability, the software also eliminates the need for costly NAS devices and load balancers.

Watch the interview for more details about the partnership.