How Dremio enhances data collaboration by eliminating data movement while delivering exceptional performance and cost savings
In an era where data is the new currency, organizations are grappling with an avalanche of complexity that threatens to overwhelm their operational efficiency.
At SIT, as Dremio’s exclusive partner in Israel, we understand the transformative potential that awaits organizations ready to break free from this cycle. As Alex Merced, Developer Advocate at Dremio, recently highlighted in his “Gnarly Data Waves” presentation, the results are compelling: OTP Bank saved 60% on storage costs, NCR achieved 10-30x performance improvements, and Hale saw 30x faster queries with 10% efficiency gains. But how does this happen?
The Hidden Costs of Traditional Data Architecture
Most organizations don’t realize how much their traditional data architecture is costing them. Beyond the obvious storage and compute expenses, there are hidden costs lurking in every data movement:
Storage Multiplication: Every time you copy data from your operational systems to your data lake, then to your warehouse, then to various data marts, you’re multiplying storage costs. What started as one dataset becomes five, ten, or even twenty copies across your infrastructure.
Compute Overhead: Each data movement requires processing power. ETL pipelines, data transformations, and sync operations consume compute resources around the clock, whether you’re actively using the data or not.
Network Fees: Cloud providers charge for data egress and API calls. Every S3 request, every cross-region transfer, every file retrieval adds up. Organizations often discover these “invisible” costs represent a significant portion of their cloud bills.
Maintenance Complexity: More copies mean more pipelines to maintain, more potential points of failure, and more engineering time spent on data plumbing instead of value creation.
For on-premises environments, the challenge is different but equally costly. Storage and compute are coupled—you can’t scale one without the other. This leads to either resource shortages or expensive over-provisioning.
Dremio’s Revolutionary Approach: Do More with Less
Dremio fundamentally changes this equation through three core mechanisms that eliminate unnecessary data movement while delivering superior performance:
1. Data Federation at Scale
Traditional data virtualization attempts often fail at scale due to performance bottlenecks. Dremio solves this by connecting directly to your databases, data warehouses, and data lakes without requiring data movement.
Unlike legacy virtualization tools that struggle with push-downs and compete with operational workloads, Dremio’s architecture enables true production-scale data federation. You can join tables from PostgreSQL with data in your S3 data lake seamlessly, as if they were in the same database.
2. Apache Arrow-Powered Performance
Dremio leverages Apache Arrow, the columnar in-memory format that originated within Dremio’s architecture, to deliver exceptional query performance without requiring specialized acceleration techniques.
Key performance advantages include:
- Cost-based query optimization that intelligently rewrites SQL for optimal execution
- Minimal serialization overhead when processing columnar data formats like Parquet
- High-speed data transfer between compute nodes using Apache Arrow Flight
- Pre-compiled procedures through Gandiva for lightning-fast analytical operations
3. Intelligent Acceleration Through Reflections
Here’s where Dremio truly differentiates itself. Traditional approaches require manual creation and maintenance of materialized views, cubes, and extracts. Dremio’s Reflections feature automates this entire process.
Raw Reflections act like intelligent materialized views, creating Apache Iceberg-based physical representations of your data. But unlike traditional materialized views, Reflections:
- Automatically sync with source data changes
- Transparently substitute for original queries without namespace changes
- Support incremental updates for Iceberg-based sources
- Can be optimized with custom partitioning and sorting strategies
Aggregate Reflections pre-compute the statistics and aggregations needed for BI dashboards, eliminating the need for manual cube creation and maintenance. When Tableau or Power BI requests data, Dremio automatically uses the appropriate reflection to deliver sub-second response times.
4. C3 Columnar Cloud Cache
Dremio’s intelligent caching system monitors query patterns and automatically caches frequently accessed data on worker nodes. This eliminates redundant network calls and dramatically reduces both query latency and cloud egress costs.
Real-World Architecture Transformation
Let’s examine how this transforms a typical data architecture. Instead of the traditional approach:
Traditional: Source → Data Lake → Data Warehouse → Data Marts → BI Extracts
With Dremio: Sources → Dremio (with virtual semantic layer) → Analytics
In the Dremio approach:
- Data stays where it is (federation eliminates most movement)
- Virtual views replace physical data marts
- Reflections provide acceleration only where needed
- Self-service analytics become truly accessible
This architecture delivers the same governance, performance, and functionality as traditional approaches, but with a fraction of the storage footprint and infrastructure complexity.
The SIT Advantage: Dremio Expertise in Israel
As Dremio’s exclusive partner in Israel, SIT brings deep technical expertise and proven implementation methodologies to your data transformation journey. Our team of data engineers has successfully deployed Dremio across diverse industries, from financial services to telecommunications to manufacturing.
We understand that every organization’s data landscape is unique. Our approach focuses on:
- Strategic planning that aligns Dremio capabilities with your business objectives
- Phased implementation that delivers value quickly while minimizing disruption
- Skills transfer that empowers your team to maximize Dremio’s potential
- Ongoing optimization that ensures continued performance and cost benefits
The Path Forward: Modern Data Architecture
The organizations achieving dramatic cost savings and performance improvements with Dremio share a common understanding: modern data architecture isn’t about moving data faster—it’s about moving data less while delivering more value.
Dremio enables this transformation by:
- Eliminating unnecessary data copies through intelligent federation
- Providing transparent acceleration that doesn’t require architectural changes
- Enabling self-service analytics that reduce dependency on data engineering teams
- Delivering cloud-native scalability without cloud-native complexity
Getting Started
The transition to a Dremio-powered data architecture doesn’t require a complete infrastructure overhaul. Many organizations start by connecting Dremio to their existing data lake, enabling faster analytics while reducing compute costs. As teams experience the benefits, they gradually expand Dremio’s role, ultimately achieving the comprehensive cost savings and performance improvements we’ve discussed.
Ready to revolutionize your data access strategy? Contact SIT to learn how Dremio can transform your organization’s approach to data integration, reduce infrastructure costs, and accelerate time-to-insight for your analytics initiatives.
SIT is the exclusive Dremio partner in Israel, specializing in modern data architecture implementations that deliver measurable business value. Our team of certified Dremio experts helps organizations break down data silos and achieve seamless integration across their entire data ecosystem.
