On-Prem and Cloud: The Why of a Hybrid Iceberg Lakehouse

Part 1: The Challenge for Organizations

Organizations must enable data users to leverage and gain insights from their data seamlessly. The goal is to drive business value through comprehensive data analysis, regardless of where the data resides: on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid cloud environments. While there is a significant push towards cloud adoption, many organizations continue to store significant amounts of their data on-premises. There are many reasons why on-premises data is here to stay, including security, privacy, regulatory concerns,  data gravity, and the location of applications.

Cloud-only lakehouse solutions inhibit broader analytical insight: Most companies retain significant amounts of data on-premises, driven by historical data gravity, regulatory requirements, and security concerns. A cloud-only solution fails to accommodate this reality, creating barriers to accessing and analyzing their critical on-premises data. As a result, organizations are unable to gain rapid and comprehensive insights, hindering their ability to make data-driven decisions efficiently. Without seamless integration between on-premises and cloud environments, the potential for leveraging all available data for holistic analysis is restricted.

Not all data can be moved to the cloud: For most organizations, it is neither reasonable, cost-effective, nor logistically feasible to transfer vast amounts of existing on-premises data into cloud environments. The cost and complexity of moving terabytes or even petabytes of data to the cloud is overwhelming and impractical. Additionally, interdependencies between existing on-premises legacy applications and databases further complicate the data migration process. These complexities often result in significant downtime and resource allocation, making the transition disruptive and costly. Therefore, maintaining a hybrid approach that leverages both on-premises and cloud environments is essential for effective and efficient data management.

Enabling self-service across multiple environments is difficult: Self-service analytics are unattainable when tools are limited to accessing and analyzing only on-prem or cloud data. Companies typically have data distributed across both on-premises and cloud environments. Using separate lakehouse solutions for each environment increases costs and management complexity, while also delaying time to insight and limiting visibility into critical business data. Users desire seamless, self-service access to all their data, but this is impossible with restricted lakehouse solutions. Consequently, users face delays in gaining analytical insights as they must rely on data teams to prepare and move data for analysis, negating true self-service capabilities.

Part 2: Dremio’s Solution

Dremio, the Unified Lakehouse Platform for Self-Service Analytics and AI, is the only lakehouse solution that unlocks the full potential of data across all environments: on-premises, cloud, and hybrid cloud. Dremio enables organizations to build a robust hybrid enterprise Iceberg Lakehouse. Dremio enables companies to seamlessly integrate on-premises and cloud data with no data movement, while eliminating data silos through Unified Analytics with an intelligent semantic layer. This holistic analytical ecosystem ensures full data access whether on-premises, in the cloud, or both. With Dremio, customers achieve lightning-fast, self-service access to all their data, reducing costs and simplifying analytics in hybrid-cloud environments.

Dremio provides the only hybrid enterprise Iceberg lakehouse in the market

Organizations need not just a lakehouse, but an enterprise-class hybrid Iceberg lakehouse that delivers all the benefits of an Iceberg-centric analytical environment. Dremio provides the market's only hybrid enterprise Iceberg Lakehouse, uniquely enabling companies to access and analyze all their data regardless of its location, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or within hybrid cloud environments. This capability is powered by Dremio’s Enterprise Iceberg Catalog, which is Apache Iceberg-native and offers advanced data lakehouse management, supporting large-scale datasets for robust analytics and business intelligence. An Iceberg lakehouse benefits organizations by providing schema evolution, partition evolution, and enhanced metadata handling, ensuring efficient data organization and query performance. At the heart of this solution is Dremio's SQL Query Engine, engineered to be the fastest, most powerful, and most cost-effective SQL query engine for Apache Iceberg. Leveraging core technologies such as Apache Arrow, the C3 columnar cache, and advanced vectorized processing, Dremio enables lightning-fast, direct querying across all data sources.

Dremio’s Hybrid  Iceberg Lakehouse allows companies to access and analyze wherever it resides.

Nearly all organizations have data both on-premises and in the cloud and struggle with analyzing data in a quick and cost-effective manner. Dremio’s Hybrid Iceberg Lakehouse revolutionizes data access and analysis by enabling companies to seamlessly interact with their data, regardless of whether it is on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid-cloud environment. This is accomplished without the cost and complexity traditionally associated with ETL processes. Dremio's SQL query engine features federated query capabilities that allow users to access and query datasets across diverse environments seamlessly, eliminating the need to establish new data pipelines whenever data needs to be analyzed from on-premises to the cloud. Furthermore, Dremio’s Reflections technology enhances query performance by creating optimized, pre-computed data representations, resulting in sub-second SQL query response times. This high-speed query acceleration enables companies to gain timely business insights from their data, wherever it resides, significantly reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) and minimizing data movement expenses. By integrating these advanced technologies, Dremio ensures that organizations can efficiently and comprehensively perform data analytics, driving better decision-making and operational efficiency.

Dremio’s Hybrid Iceberg Lakehouse enables self service

Dremio’s Hybrid Iceberg Lakehouse platform empowers self-service analytics for a company's analytical users, including BI users, power users and data scientists. By leveraging a robust, scalable, and easy-to-use universal semantic layer, Dremio provides a consistent, business-friendly view of data across the organization. This semantic layer simplifies data access and comprehension, allowing users to perform sophisticated queries and analyses without needing to understand underlying data complexities. Dremio’s Unified Analytics capability seamlessly integrates data from on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, eliminating the need for complex ETL processes and enabling real-time data access for users. Additionally, Dremio’s SQL query engine with Reflections technology drastically enhances query performance by providing sub-second response times on massive data sets.This combination of features ensures that all users, from data analysts to business intelligence professionals, can easily access, explore, and derive insights from their data, fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making across the organization. By offering an intuitive interface and robust query capabilities, Dremio enables true self-service analytics, accelerating time-to-insight and enhancing overall efficiency.

Part 3 Partners 

Dremio's enterprise storage partners play a crucial role in enhancing its Hybrid Iceberg Lakehouse solution by providing advanced data management, accessibility, and analytics across various environments.

VAST Data offers cutting-edge storage solutions that deliver exceptional performance, scalability, and simplicity. Dremio’s partnership with VAST enables companies to manage and analyze large volumes of data seamlessly across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. The synergy between VAST Data's robust storage platform and Dremio's Unified Lakehouse Platform empowers businesses to achieve high-speed access and advanced analytics capabilities, driving innovation and competitive advantage.

NetApp provides industry-leading data management solutions known for their storage efficiency, reliability, and scalability. Through their collaboration with Dremio, NetApp facilitates faster, more efficient data access and advanced analytics across diverse environments. This partnership allows businesses to manage and analyze data in NetApp StorageGRID (object storage), as well as cloud storage environments like Amazon S3, Microsoft ADLS, and Google Cloud Storage. The integration of NetApp’s StorageGRID with Dremio’s Unified Lakehouse Platform supports a hybrid enterprise Iceberg lakehouse, enhancing performance and enabling comprehensive analytics.

MinIO offers high-performance, scalable object storage software that is hardware-agnostic and runs on various hardware solutions. By partnering with Dremio, MinIO ensures seamless and fast access to data, enabling advanced analytics and real-time insights. Our joint partnership helps businesses efficiently manage and analyze large datasets across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. The combination of MinIO’s robust object storage software and Dremio’s Hybrid Iceberg Lakehouse fosters innovation, improves performance, and enhances data-driven decision-making.

Pure Storage delivers top-tier data storage solutions renowned for their exceptional scalability and performance. Dremio’s partnership with Pure Storage allows companies to access and analyze data with unprecedented speed and efficiency. This collaboration enables businesses to integrate and manage data seamlessly across on-premises and cloud environments, facilitating advanced analytics and real-time insights. The combination of Pure Storage’s cutting-edge storage technology and Dremio’s powerful Unified Lakehouse Platform empowers companies to optimize operations, drive business insights, and reduce costs while increasing customer value.

These partnerships collectively enhance Dremio's ability to provide a robust, scalable, and efficient hybrid enterprise Iceberg lakehouse solution, enabling organizations to leverage their data fully across all environments.

Conclusion

Dremio is the only company offering an hybrid enterprise Iceberg lakehouse that provides seamless self-service analytics, directly connecting users to their data. Dremio’s Universal Semantic Layer transforms data into a business-friendly format, enabling easy discovery and analysis. With the support of our partners, Dremio delivers a market-leading hybrid lakehouse solution that allows companies to fully leverage both their on-premises and cloud data. Analytical users can now extract actionable insights without needing to understand the underlying physical data structure or its location, thus accelerating time to insight, reducing TCO, and increasing value.

Book a Meeting today to Explore whether a Hybrid Iceberg Lakehouse is the right solution for your use case.