WANdisco, Inc. is a United States based software company involved in the production of Subversion, a software versioning and revision control system.
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Configuration Management Computer Software |
| Founded | San Ramon, U.S. (2001) |
| Headquarters | San Ramon, California, U.S. |
| Key people |
Dr Yeturu Aahlad (Inventor) |
| Products | uberSVN Subversion Multisite, Clustering & HIgh Availability CVS Multisite & Clustering |
| Employees | 50 |
| Website | www.wandisco.com |
Contents |
WANdisco (Wide Area Network Distributed Computing) was incorporated in 2005. Initially offering a replicated multisite product for CVS this was expanded to include CVSNT, Subversion and JIRA in subsequent years.[1]
In January 2007 David Richards became President and Chief Executive Officer and expanded operations to become more involved in the Apache Subversion project itself.
During 2008 WANdisco opened a new European Headquarters in Sheffield, UK and was named on the SD Times 100 List[2]. In 2009 WANdisco was awarded the Sheffield Technology Parks Business of the Year Award[3].
WANdisco’s Distributed Coordination Engine (DConE) is the shared component that powers all WANdisco clustering products.[4]. The DConE system allows multiple instances of the same application to operate on independent hardware without sharing any resources. All of the application servers are kept in synchronisation by DConE regardless of whether the servers are on the same LAN or globally separated and accessible only over a WAN. This is achieved by replicating changes made against one server to the others in real-time (Active replication).
WANdisco's replication technology was the work of Dr Yeturu Aahlad who had previously worked for Sun, Netscape and IBM and was heavily involved in developing the CORBA Framework[5]. Dr Aahlad theorized a model for effective Active replication over a WAN.
WANdisco provides a range of clustering products for CVS and Subversion as well as Subversion support and consultancy services. In 2011 WANdisco launched uberSVN, a deployment of Apache Subversion which includes a web based management console and the ability to add additional ALM features easily.
The company's website lists various Fortune Global 1000 companies such as AT&T, APC, Avaya, Bally Technologies, Thales Group, Verisign, Sun Microsystems, Honda, NTT, Intel and Motorola[6].
In October 2009, WANdisco provided funding for three full time Open Source contributors to work on the Subversion project[7]. One of the contributors, Hyrum Wright was also appointed as WANdisco’s Director of Open Source. The other contributors are Philip Martin who had been a core Subversion contributor for the previous 8 years and was part of the original Subversion development team, and Julian Foad who had been a core Subversion contributor since 2003.
WANdisco currently provides Subversion binary downloads for Debian, CentOS and RHEL via its website[8]. These binaries have been through a complete testing cycle and use the default package management system for each Linux distribution.
On April 22nd 2011 WANDisco launched UberSVN, a package containing Subversion and all its dependencies with an easy to use installer and web based management interface. The goal of UberSVN is to provide "an open extensible platform for application lifecycle management (ALM) that's easy to install, easy to use and easy to extend." [9]
In December 2010, WANdisco announced their intention to undertake major work on the Subversion project,[10] specifically aimed at improving branching and merging functionality. These changes had been proposed by the community previously but there had been no activity towards implementing them. WANdisco stated that demand from their enterprise customers had led to the decision to commit resources in this area.
Some perceived the timing and manner of the announcement to be controversial[11] and at odds with the Apache Software Foundation's position as leaders of the Subversion project[12][13]. David Richards from WANdisco clarified this position stating that he in no way wished to undermine the Subversion community[14] and followed up by announcing WANdisco's sponsorship and ongoing support for the work of the Apache Software Foundation.[15]