Dremio Targets Data Lakehouse Tasks With Dremio Cloud Debut

Dremio founder Tomer Shiran says the company’s new cloud-based data lakehouse offering will make on-premises and cloud data warehouse systems a technology of the past.

Building on its core SQL query acceleration technology, big data startup Dremio has unveiled a cloud-native, SQL-based data lakehouse service that works directly with cloud storage systems and – according to company executives – will eliminate the need for traditional data warehouses.

Dremio Cloud, a fully managed data lakehouse built on the AWS public cloud, will help data teams, analysts and data scientists more quickly access the increasingly huge volumes of data businesses and organizations are working with today, according to the company.

Currently in limited availability, Dremio Cloud also boasts “infinite” scalability, advanced security, and bi-directional query capabilities with business analytics tools such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.

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“Data teams are in this really difficult situation,” said Tomer Shiran, Dremio founder and chief product officer, in an interview with CRN. “They want to democratize data and make it accessible to everybody with all the security and governance that’s required. But because of data volumes and the demand for data, that’s becoming harder and harder rather than easier.”

Data analytics has traditionally required moving data into dedicated data warehouse systems, originally on-premises systems but more recently into cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, AWS Redshift and Microsoft Synapse. There the data is prepared and formatted for use by data scientists, business analysts and other information workers.

But data warehouses can be complex and costly to set up, operate and maintain. And copying data from storage systems like AWS S3 to data warehouses is a time-consuming chore.

“Nobody moves data because they want to. People only move data because they have to,” Shiran said.

Data lakes, meanwhile, are huge stores of unorganized data, often spread across multiple on-premises and cloud storage systems. A number of big data companies, including Dremio, Databricks and Starburst, have been promoting the “data lakehouse” concept – leveraging data lakes for business analytics and other big data tasks without the need to move data to a data warehouse.

That architectural concept, Shiran said, makes data warehouse systems like Snowflake, AWS Redshift and Microsoft Synapse “no longer necessary.”

Dremio, founded in 2015, develops a high-performance SQL query engine based on open-source Apache Arrow technology. It performs SQL query workloads directly against stored data, powering interactive analytics and business intelligence dashboards.

While Dremio’s software can run on cloud platforms – Shiran said about 80 percent of Dremio deployments are in the cloud – Dremio Cloud is the company’s first fully managed cloud offering. Dremio Cloud was unveiled this week at Subsurface Live, the company’s two-day virtual conference.

Dremio Cloud leverages Dremio’s query acceleration and semantic layer technologies. Shiran said Dremio Cloud “allows you to query the data directly in cloud data lake storage at the speed that users need for things like BI dashboards.”

Dremio Cloud offers multiple layers of data protection and is SOC 2-compliant, according to the company. Data is encrypted both at rest and in transit, supports native single-sign-on connectors in Tableau and Microsoft Power BI, and includes role-based access controls that allow companies to define access privileges on every dataset and object in a system. Users and data integrations are managed and secured on a global level, rather than a regional level, Shiran said.

Running on AWS, Dremio is currently offering Dremio Cloud on a “limited availability” or invitation-only basis with general availability expected toward the end of the year.

Dremio says customers can be running Dremio Cloud in as little as five minutes using an automatic onboarding option that establishes the necessary connection to a user’s AWS account.

The company works with systems integrators as part of its go-to-market efforts and Shiran said Dremio recently expanded its team that works with integrators and other partners.

Dremio, founded in 2015 and based in Santa Clara, Calif., raised $135 million in Series D funding in January, boosting the company’s pre-money valuation to $1 billion.