HPE + Starburst: Setting the stage for the Active Data Lakehouse Era

A new and exciting chapter in the data lakehouse era has begun with the launch of the HPE Active Data Lakehouse with Starburst. This new enterprise data solution sees Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Starburst come together to launch a transformative milestone in modern data architecture and data management. The new Active Data Lakeouse solution integrates HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 with Starburst’s analytics engine, delivering a high-performance, cost-effective approach built for both hybrid data architectures and AI-driven enterprises. It combines the best of HPE and Starburst to create something that serves real data management and analytics needs and solves real business problems. 

Starburst + HPE

Starburst with HPE’s Active Data Lakehouse represents a complementary solution for data analytics and AI workloads. As data’s importance continues to expand, organizations increasingly require data architecture and data management that can serve both use cases. This dual mandate–analytics and AI–directly feeds into Starburst and HPE’s value. 

Let’s explore what this means for customers, the broader ecosystem, the future of data-driven innovation, and why the HPE Active Data Lakehouse matters:  

1. Unified access to high-performance storage at scale

Unified Data access is one of the most significant problems in data, whether considering data architecture serving analytics or AI use cases. Starburst acts as a single foundation for all your data. It operates in a hybrid, on-premises, in the cloud, and across cloud environments. Using this approach, you can run queries or AI workloads on multiple data sources as if they were a single data source. Meanwhile, you can centralize as much or as little data as you need in the lakehouse. 

HPE’s X10000, provides scalable, high-performance object storage capable of housing structured data, semi-structured data, and unstructured data. This offers an ideal solution for organizations expanding their on-premises environment, whether for compliance or regulatory reasons or those looking to augment their hybrid environment. 

The combination of Starburst and HPE Active Lakehouse helps eliminate organizational data silos, enabling organizations to access, analyze and work with data where it resides without costly data movement.  

 

2. Cost efficiency and scalability  

Any data solution needs to work at scale. By leveraging open table formats like Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake, the HPE Active Data Lakehouse with Starburst solution reduces infrastructure costs by up to 53% while accelerating query performance and time-to-insight by 90%.  

These efficiencies become even more impactful with AI. Starburst is the ideal foundation for your AI workflow. Ensuring secured, governed data with autoscaling compute resources ensures secure & optimal performance for dynamic workloads, from real-time analytics to AI inferencing, including Retrieveal-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic workflows.  

3. Future-proof your data architecture with interoperability

Any data platform needs to be able to grow to meet future needs. This means being able to access all data sources–past and present. It also means ensuring that your data governance scales as quickly as your data architecture. 

To meet these demands, the HPE Active Data Lakehouse with Starburst supports a variety of modern data tools, including Apache Spark, Icehouse architecture powered by Apache Iceberg, and other open table formats. This approach ensures compatibility with evolving AI/ML frameworks. By taking an open data architecture approach, organizations avoid vendor lock-in, maintaining flexibility across multi-cloud and on-premises environments–now and in the future.  

 

How customers will use HPE Active Data Lakehouse with Starburst: High-impact use cases  

The HPE Active Data Lakehouse with Starburst isn’t just another new technology. It’s a new way of solving business problems that address the nature of today’s data. It also addresses the evolving methods for extracting value from that data–both for analytics and AI. 

Let’s examine how customers will use the HPE Active Data Lakehouse with Starburst to solve real problems. 

1. Unlocking real-time customer analytics  

Data velocity is only increasing, and capturing that data for analytics and AI is becoming a major focus. For example, organizations such as retailers often work with datasets that undergo frequent updates and deletes. Capturing this data type can be challenging as it requires real-time ingestion at scale. 

The HPE Active Data Lakehouse, with Starburst, solves this problem by unifying data across your organization. For example, structured transactional data can be combined with semi-structured or unstructured social media data, delivering personalized offers in seconds and bypassing legacy and costly ETL pipelines.  

2. Serving AI/ML models at scale  

The AI era is here. Organizations of all sizes are working to get the value of AI into their organization – fast! In all cases, there is a need for data management architecture capable of serving AI and ML models securely at scale. AI insights are only as good as the data that goes into them, and the HPE Active Data Lakehouse with Starburst helps build the infrastructure that feeds those models. 

Using this solution, healthcare providers can train models on distributed datasets. For example, imaging data held in object storage and EHR data held in databases can be used together without duplicating sensitive data. Furthermore, the Starburst platform can be used for RAG and agentic workflows as it provides secured, governed, and compliant data to the LLM model.  

3. Securing hybrid cloud governance  

Data governance is also an important factor, particularly in an era where data is spread across multiple on-premises and cloud environments. 

For example, financial institutions operate in a highly regulated environment. Starburst helps financial clients remain compliant, including those on data sovereignty. Because Starburst lets you access data wherever it lives, you do not need to move data to access it. This allows financial organizations to query on-premises and cross-cloud data while remaining compliant.  

The HPE Active Data Lakehouse with Starburst expands on this principle, leveraging HPE’s strength in on-premises data while augmenting it with Starburst’s approach to access. 

 

Starburst’s Ecosystem: A Testament to the Industry betting on Starburst

The HPE announcement follows Starburst’s growing list of strategic technology alliances, including the Dell Data Lakehouse, which combines PowerEdge servers with Starburst’s engine for turnkey and performant lakehouse deployments. 

Overall, Starburst’s partnerships underscore its key differentiators, which are increasingly becoming an important factor when considering which software to drive both analytics and AI workloads.   

These include: 

• Hybrid: Unified data and analytics on-premises, cloud, cross-cloud, or air-gapped environments, with consistent security and governance.  
• Data Product: Maintain secure, governed, and compliant datasets (e.g., customer 360, supply chain,) which can be self-served or published to BI tools or to AI workflows or models.
• Cost-Effective Data Lakehouse: By decoupling storage and compute, Starburst delivers up to 90% faster queries at half the cost of traditional warehouses.  

Looking Ahead: Open, Hybrid Data Management 

As industry leaders like HPE and Dell bet on Starburst for their data platform and data management needs, it’s clear that the future lies in open, hybrid data management. Customers no longer need to choose between performance and flexibility—or between cloud innovation and on-premises control. With Starburst at the core, organizations can build a truly decentralized hybrid data management ecosystem that is built-ready for the next wave of AI and beyond.