Hybrid Iceberg Lakehouse Infrastructure Solutions: VAST Data

The data lakehouse is an architectural pattern that leverages storage layers like Hadoop or object storage as the center of gravity for your data. Using tools like Dremio, you can create a decoupled, modular data warehouse. The key component connecting platforms like Dremio to your data lake is a data lakehouse table format such as Apache Iceberg. This enables your data lake to be treated as database tables with all the same ACID guarantees.

Data Lakehouses provide:

• Cost Savings: Fewer copies of your data and less compute required for ETL pipelines.
  
• Flexibility: Multiple tools can operate on a single copy of your data.
  
• Reduced Time to Insight: With minimal data movement, you can deliver data to BI dashboards and AI/ML models more quickly.

Beyond the inherent benefits of the data lakehouse architecture, the specific tools you use to construct it can further enhance these advantages. Two primary components are the data lakehouse platform and the infrastructure layer.

Dremio: The Data Lakehouse Platform

Dremio, a data lakehouse platform, maximizes the benefits of the data lakehouse in three key ways:

• Unified Analytics: Dremio unifies your data lakehouse with other data sources like databases and data warehouses. It includes an integrated semantic layer for defining your data models and metrics across all your data.
  
• SQL Query Engine: Dremio boasts a best-in-class SQL query engine that delivers industry-leading price/performance for running queries across all your data sources.
  
• Lakehouse Management: Dremio automates the processes needed to maintain and optimize your data lakehouse tables. It also offers an enterprise catalog with Git-like features for unique data quality management.

While Dremio serves as the data lakehouse platform, your data infrastructure/storage layer can also bring many unique features and added value to your overall hybrid lakehouse architecture. Let's highlight one of these exceptional data infrastructure solution partners .

What is VAST Data?

VAST Data is an AI data platform company that provides simple and scalable infrastructure for data-intensive computing. VAST addresses the increasing demands of data storage and analysis with a platform that gives users direct and efficient access to vast amounts of data, transforming raw data into valuable insights. It enables organizations to capture, catalog, refine, and preserve data through real-time deep data analysis and deep learning.

Features of the VAST Data Platform

The VAST Data Platform offers intelligent storage for unstructured and structured data, as well as a range of advanced features designed to enhance data management and accessibility.High-performance data ingestion capabilities allow companies to ingest millions of rows of data per second into their storage infrastructure, while the platform’s built-in intelligence automatically organizes both unstructured and structured data upon ingestion, enabling immediate analysis. VAST supports all major data types and protocols, ensuring data access for CPU and GPU-intensive AI tasks without additional system requirements. This helps significantly accelerate query speeds and enable rapid, data-driven decisions. Additionally, providing the unified storage access from edge to cloud helps eliminate storage silos by providing a global namespace, ensuring consistent performance and seamless data management across all locations.

The Architecture of VAST Data

The VAST Data Platform utilizes a Disaggregated, Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture designed by VAST and introduced in 2019. This architecture separates system state and logic, enabling high-performance parallel data access from all compute nodes. It features a shared transactional data structure that ensures data consistency and integrity without requiring east-west traffic, allowing for significant scalability and performance improvements. This design allows companies to consolidate all their data into a single, efficient namespace, making it an ideal solution for modern lakehouse environments.

Platform Components

The VAST DataBase and VAST DataStore are critical components of the VAST Data Platform that power the VAST and Dremio Hybrid Lakehouse solution. The VAST DataBase enables high-performance data transactions, making it ideal for real-time data ingestion and analytics while the VAST DataStore combines the speed cost-efficiency providing a balanced, high-performance file and object storage solution. These two components are suited to meet the data management needs of a hybrid lakehouse environment.

VAST DataStore 

The VAST DataStore is is built to handle vast amounts of data efficiently, leveraging the latest advancements in storage technology to deliver  performance and cost-efficiency. It combines all-flash performance with the economics of traditional HDD storage. Supporting high performance S3 compatible object storage, the VAST DataStore provides an environment for companies to utilize the Iceberg table format when building their hybrid Iceberg lakehouse. It ensures that all data, regardless of its age or frequency of access, is stored in an efficient manner. This capability is crucial for businesses that need to manage large volumes of data without compromising on access speed or incurring prohibitive costs.

VAST DataBase

The VAST DataBase is designed to handle large-scale, high-performance data transactions. It supports full ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transactions, ensuring that all database operations are reliable and adhere to strict consistency standards. The VAST DataBase can handle millions of transactions per second, providing the necessary throughput for data-intensive lakehouse environments. It is also designed to scale seamlessly, accommodating growing data volumes without compromising performance. 

Features such as snapshot and object immutability, asynchronous replication with automated failover, and encryption at rest and in transit help ensure data and storage security and resilience in lakehouse environments. Dremio’s connector for the VAST DataBase allows organizations to leverage the full power of VAST in their hybrid lakehouse environments.

VAST Data and Dremio: A Powerful Integration

Dremio is the top platform for data lakehouse solutions, offering seamless, self-service data access and high performance analysis across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. When integrated with the VAST Data Platform, the joint offering delivers a powerful solution for businesses looking to maximize their data’s potential.

Advantages of the VAST Data and Dremio Hybrid Lakehouse 

Unified Data Access: Combining VAST Data and Dremio eliminates data silos and provides a unified view of all organizational data whether it is on-premises, in the cloud or both. This ensures data is readily available for analysis, regardless of its physical location.

Enhanced Performance: VAST Data’s high-speed data ingestion and analysis, coupled with Dremio’s SQL query performance optimizations, results in faster query times and more efficient data processing. This allows companies to quickly derive valuable business insights and make informed decisions.

Scalability: The VAST Data Platform and Dremio’s architectures both support massive scalability, enabling companies to manage and analyze data at an exabyte scale without performance degradation.

Cost Efficiency: By eliminating costly data movement, and improving overall data manageability and performance means significant cost savings across any organization's analytical environment. VAST and Dremio’s hybrid lakehouse solution decreases TCO and improves business insight. 

AI-Driven Insights: The combined capabilities of VAST Data and Dremio empower companies to leverage AI and machine learning more efficiently for real-time data analysis, uncovering valuable insights that drive strategic decisions and innovation.

Conclusion

In the modern, data-driven landscape, efficient data storage, management, and analysis are essential for staying competitive. The VAST Data Platform, with its innovative architecture and comprehensive features, provides a powerful solution for data-intensive computing. When combined with Dremio, in a data lakehouse solution, companies can unlock the full potential of their data, accelerating insights, decision-making, and ensuring cost efficiency and security. Leveraging the combined power of VAST Data and Dremio, companies can transform their data into actionable knowledge, enabling them to lead with vision and innovation.

Want to learn about how to implement Dremio and VAST Data for your Data Lakehouse? Contact Us!