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Big Data

Accelerating AI with an Open, Modern Data Lakehouse

Introducing the Dell Data Lakehouse: power your business with AI anywhere from data everywhere.
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Last October, I wrote about the challenges that prevent organizations from fully unlocking the potential of AI to drive business outcomes. Since then, the continued rise of AI has shone an even brighter light on one of the most critical ingredients to a successful AI strategy: an AI-ready data platform.

In a landscape fraught with decentralized data, legacy systems, data sovereignty concerns and cloud-native applications that only operate on data in the clouds, organizations continue to struggle. Research from Boston Consulting Group found that among more than 50% of data leaders, architectural complexity is a major pain point—forcing organizations into significant complexity, generating avoidable costs and losing critical time to value.

datalake - AI - Dell - data management - AI ready - Dell Technologies - NVIDIA GTCData practitioners are facing formidable challenges. Traditional data warehouses confine data within proprietary formats, hindering universal access. Data lakes lack reliability and governance and don’t perform well. And two-tier architectures offer two suboptimal choices: either use high-quality but old data from a warehouse or use fresh but unreliable data from a lake. The emergence of data lakehouses aims to reconcile these issues, yet choices remain insufficient. Cloud solutions require migration and are cost prohibitive at scale. On-prem solutions are bogged down by legacy and proprietary technology. And open source, while innovative, entails high integration costs.

IT teams are struggling too. Consolidating disparate data sources into a single source of truth is a never-ending effort. Managing a proliferating array of data infrastructure tools strains resources. The complexity of overseeing multiple components underscores the need for simplicity.

Clearly, customers deserve a better answer. And just like I said before, one that works with their data gravity and not against it. One that brings simplicity and accelerates time to value.

Today marks an exciting milestone because we’re delivering on our promise with the general availability of the Dell Data Lakehouse. This new offering provides customers a fully integrated data platform built on Dell AI-optimized hardware and a full-stack software suite, powered by Starburst’s powerful and innovative query engine.

“As Dell continues to lead the charge in storage and compute innovation, Starburst proudly offers its high-performance data lakehouse analytics offering and expertise. Just as Dell’s storage technology forms the foundation of the data lake, Starburst serves as the dynamic lakehouse engine, harmonizing data into actionable insights,” said Justin Borgman, Chief Executive Officer, Starburst. “Together, we emerge as the Dell Data Lakehouse and ready to redefine the landscape of data management and analytics.”

Five Key Promises of the Dell Data Lakehouse

As we discussed in October, our vision for an open, modern data lakehouse includes key components to help our customers tackle their greatest data challenges. The Dell Data Lakehouse delivers on five key promises:

    1. Eliminate data silos. Enhance data exploration with secure, federated querying, powered by Starburst, accelerating time to insights by up to 90%¹ and revealing usage patterns that enable smarter data centralization into the data lakehouse.
    2. Unleash performance at scale. With a distributed, massively parallelized engine running on tailor-made infrastructure that separates compute and storage, achieve unparalleled performance that scales as your needs grow.
    3. Take control of your data. 100% open format driven and future-ready with modern industry standards such as file formats like Parquet, Avro, ORC and table formats like Iceberg and Delta Lake. Built-in data governance helps you remain in control of your data and empowers you to navigate evolving landscapes with confidence and clarity.
    4. Democratize insights. Give your data team self-service access so they can create high-quality data products, fostering a culture of collaboration and exploration to move your business forward. Integrate with a wide ecosystem of tools such as BI, AI and ML tools, enabling a wider reach for innovation across the organization.
    5. One simplified platform. Designed to streamline deployment, lifecycle management and support services, this turnkey solution encompassing compute, software and storage components delivers a cost-effective and predictable outlay versus cloud-based options. Dell Data Analytics Engine enables 3x faster time to insight at half the cost of other comparable technologies.² Dell ECS storage can save up to 76% in total cost of ownership versus public cloud offers.³ And finally, Dell Lakehouse System Software can deliver significant operational savings by reducing  manual effort across the lifecycle.

This technology, coupled with Dell Services, helps organizations accelerate AI outcomes at every stage. Leverage trusted experts from Dell Technologies, named among Forbes 2023 World’s Best Management Consulting Firms, to align a winning strategy, validate data sets quickly, implement your data platform and maintain secure, optimized operations.

The next generation of AI will require organizations to adopt new architectures for their data platform. We believe that platform should be an open, modern data lakehouse that serves as a highly secure, single point of access to all data. The powerful combination of Dell Data Analytics Engine with compute (PowerEdge), object storage (ECS, ObjectScale and PowerScale) and Professional Services gives organizations the ability to set the foundation for a high-performance, scalable data platform for the AI era.

Tune in to NVIDIA GTC and Dell Technologies World to learn more about Dell Data Lakehouse.

Learn more about the components of the solution in our technical blog or on our website. Contact your Dell account executive to explore the Dell Data Lakehouse for your data needs.

1 ESG Economic Validation. McAfee, Nathan. Apr 2022. “Analyzing the Economic Benefits of Starburst Enterprise”
2 Cloud Data Warehouse vs. Cloud Data Lakehouse: A Snowflake vs. Starburst TCO and Performance Comparison, published by GigaOm.
3 ESG Economic Validation sponsored by Dell Technologies, “Analyzing the Economic Benefits of Dell ECS: Economic Benefit Analysis of On-premises Object Storage versus Public Cloud,” by Tony Palmer, July 2022. Cost savings based on ESG comparison of ECS to a leading public cloud in active storage scenarios.

Greg Findlen

About the Author: Greg Findlen

Greg is Senior Vice President of Product Management of Data Management at Dell Technologies. He is focused on efforts in the data management space to build solutions to enable customers better unlock the value from the data they generate each day across their organization. Prior to this role, he spent years leading engineering teams focused on developing products that scale across Dell’s enterprise portfolio of products, such as APEX, CloudIQ and others. Greg has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry and joined the company in 2006. Since joining Dell he has held a variety of positions across the Infrastructure Solutions Group and has led key functions including development, data analytics, pricing, business operations, program management and strategy development. Greg also served as a leader of the Dell and EMC integration which drove all key aspects of the merger planning related to the products and engineering teams. Prior to his time at Dell, he worked in the semiconductor test industry and drove quality improvement efforts, supplier relationships, and engaged across development and operations roles.