Hybrid Iceberg Lakehouse Storage Solutions: MinIO

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 an open 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 storage layer.

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 storage layer can also bring many unique features and added value to your overall lakehouse architecture. Let's highlight one of these exceptional storage solutions.

What is MinIO?

MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible, Kubernetes-native object store. It delivers S3-like infrastructure across public clouds (1M hosts across AWS, GCP and Azure), private clouds (nearly 2M Docker pulls a day), private cloud Kubernetes distributions (Tanzu, OpenShift, Ezmeral, Rancher/SUSE), on-prem and the edge. Enterprises (including 77% of the Fortune 100) use MinIO to deliver against AI/ML, analytics, backup and archival workloads - all from a single platform.

MinIO offers a rich suite of enterprise features targeting security, resiliency, data protection, and scalability. It is commonly used to build streaming data pipelines and AI data lakes because it is highly scalable, performant, durable, and it works with many AI tools including Anthropic, PyTorch and many more.

The entire MinIO binary is <100mb and is remarkably easy to install and manage. It will run on any hardware and will almost always be constrained by the limitations of the hardware. While it powers some of the biggest private cloud workloads in the world, it is also ideal for air-gapped environments and deployments where small footprint performance is a requirement (drones, satellites, rockets). 

MinIO Architecture

Here are the common MinIO use cases across different industries.

• Big Data Analytics & AI/ML
• Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) replacements
• Log analytics/SIEM/Threat Hunting Data Lakes
• Hybrid/Multicloud Architectures
• Public cloud repatriation 

Because of MinIO’s architecture, strict consistency is guaranteed while promoting fewer points of failure and enabling organizations to achieve great performance at a lower cost. It aligns well with Dremio’s superior price-performance value. 

What does MinIO bring to the table?

Organizations wanting to have more control over their storage solutions are opting to repatriate their data and use cases on-prem or colo. For example, with MinIO, one company was able to reduce their data infrastructure costs by 80% while simultaneously improving performance by 33%. The impact enabled the enterprise to improve the gross margin of the entire business by more than 2%.

Integrating MinIO with Dremio as the Unified Datalakehouse Platform provides immense benefits:

High Performance

With its focus on high performance (GETs and PUTs exceeding 325 GiB/sec and 165 GiB/sec on 32 nodes of NVMe drives and a 100Gbe network), MinIO enables enterprises to support multiple use cases with the same platform. For example, MinIO’s performance characteristics mean that you can run multiple Spark, Dremio, and Hive queries, or to quickly test, train and deploy AI algorithms, without suffering a storage bottleneck. MinIO object storage is used as the primary storage for cloud native applications that require higher throughput and lower latency than traditional object storage can provide. With Dremio’s infinite computing power matched with MinIO’s massive throughput, querying large volumes of data is both easy and fast. 

MinIO Performance Characteristics:

• Single Layer architecture - less complexity, lower latency
• All operations are single and atomic - metadata and objects written together
• Core parts are written in assembly language - hyperfast, even on commodity hardware

Together MinIO and Dremio provide a scalable and high-performing Unified Data Lakehouse solution at a fraction of the cost. 

Scalability & Resilience

MinIO supports exascale deployments, active-active (and active-passive) replication and erasure coding, ensuring data integrity and availability even in case of failures. MinIO scales to multiple regions and with its Sidekick Load Balancer, it determines site availability and routes traffic accordingly in real time. For objects that are frequently accessed, MinIO can operate with a distributed shared cache (DRAM) essentially acting like an in-memory object store. It also provides superior data protection through its erasure coding and bitrot protection. This guarantees that data is always accessible for Dremio to query, so organizations can have confidence that data is always available when they need it.

Cloud-Native

MinIO was built from scratch with a focus on being native to the technologies and architectures that define the cloud. These include containerization, orchestration with Kubernetes, microservices and multi-tenancy. This allows it to integrate seamlessly with cloud-native ecosystems and support multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. Just like Dremio, MinIO can be deployed in private or public clouds using Kubernetes via its Kubernetes Operator. An example deployment is shown below.

With autoscaling supported by Dremio and MinIO, there are no limits to what customers can do with their data.

Comprehensive Security

MinIO offers advanced encryption, tamper-proof capabilities, identity and access management, and compliance features like versioning and object locking. With the combination of Dremio’s RBAC and Column-level protection along with MinIO’s server-side encryption, organizations are guaranteed secure access to their governed data. The performance overhead is negligible when accessing encrypted data. Operate with confidence at all levels of compliance.

Simplicity

Minimalism is a guiding design principle at MinIO. Simplicity reduces opportunities for errors, improves uptime, delivers reliability while serving as the foundation for performance. MinIO’s <>100MB binary can be installed and configured within minutes with sub-second updates. MinIO also supports commodity hardware, provides a unified interface with GraphQL and is fully S3 compatible. Ease-of-use is also at the core of Dremio and perfectly aligns with MinIO’s simplicity. This greatly reduces the overhead in managing these systems. Not only that, but also reducing infrastructure costs. 

Operational Efficiency

MinIO includes robust observability, audit logging, and lifecycle management, and integrates with tools like Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring. Combined with Dremio’s Semantic Layer, Data Lineage and Job statistics, data engineers will be able to reduce downtime significantly and become more proactive in managing their data platform.

Advantages of the MinIO and Dremio Hybrid Lakehouse 

Unified Data Access: The integration of MinIO and Dremio offers seamless access to data across different storage environments, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid setup. This eliminates data silos, ensuring that data engineers, scientists, and analysts have a unified view of all organizational data, streamlining data analysis processes regardless of data location.

Enhanced Performance: MinIO's high throughput and IOPS, combined with Dremio's optimized SQL query engine, significantly reduce query times and enhance the performance of analytics operations. This powerful combination enables data professionals to quickly extract meaningful insights and make informed decisions, supporting fast-paced business environments.

Scalability: Both MinIO and Dremio are designed to scale efficiently, handling data at an exabyte scale without compromising performance. This scalability is crucial for data engineers managing large datasets, allowing them to accommodate growing data volumes and increasing analytical demands seamlessly.

Cost Efficiency: The hybrid lakehouse solution provided by MinIO and Dremio minimizes the need for expensive data movement and enhances overall data manageability and performance. This results in substantial cost savings and a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), making it an economically attractive solution for organizations aiming to optimize their analytical infrastructure.

AI-Driven Insights: The combined capabilities of MinIO and Dremio facilitate efficient utilization of AI and machine learning tools for real-time data analysis. This empowers data scientists and analysts to uncover valuable insights, driving strategic decision-making and fostering innovation within the organization.

Conclusion: The Perfect Synergy For Modern Data Needs

The integration of MinIO and Dremio offers a cutting-edge hybrid lakehouse solution that is tailor-made for modern data challenges. MinIO's robust object storage capabilities, combined with Dremio's powerful data lakehouse platform, create an unbeatable partnership for any organization seeking to harness the full potential of their data.

By leveraging MinIO's high performance, scalability, and security features, alongside Dremio's unified analytics and superior query performance, organizations can achieve unparalleled data accessibility and efficiency. This seamless integration not only reduces costs and complexity but also accelerates time-to-insight, enabling faster, more informed decision-making.

Whether you're dealing with massive datasets, complex data environments, or the need for real-time analytics, the MinIO and Dremio hybrid lakehouse provides the perfect solution. It's an investment in future-proofing your data infrastructure, driving innovation, and unlocking new business opportunities. Make the smart choice today and transform your data strategy with MinIO and Dremio.

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