Hi everyone,
I’m involved in the evaluation of Dremio for a potential client.
One of the relevant components of the evaluation is, obviously, the cost of the solution.
So i was wondering if you could share with us the licensing structure and associated costs?
I’m not asking for a specific quote (as you answered in link for example ) but more of a “price-per-unit”, allowing us to determine the overall cost for a specific solution proposal.
Thanks everyone for any help!
Sincerely,
Bruno Nunes
Dremio has clearly set themselves up for a moonshot in terms of the quality of their product and its amazing capabilities. Call me a fan—it’s an excellent piece of software and It’s solved a ton of problems for our organization’s data management needs.
That being said, there is a definite target market for all of this spectacular software, and it’s not the company I work for, which is a medium-sized independent ad agency of about 160 employees. They’re out for some serious corporate money. For our company and specific use case (on-premise, isolated, multiple boutique-scale client data platform instances) the mid-5-figure “startup” license and 6-figure-for-starters regular licenses were… shall we say… astronomical.
Luckily, the Dremio-OSS software is quite adequate for our needs and, with some creative system administration, is securable inside an LDAP auth framework and is easy to scale into a platform that readily handles hundreds of millions of rows on some very lightweight infrastructure.
Hi AWaschick,
First of all, thanks for your time.
Glad to know that Dremio has worked for you in a real world scenario!
About the pricing, that doesn’t really surprise me, but i was wondering if there’s a transparent cost structure or if it works more like an ad-hoc licencing scheme.
It is non the less a bit pricey, i gather, from what you experienced.
Was that quote monthly/anual/lifetime?
Regarding the LDAP integration you mentioned, did you go for an in-house developed solution (since i believe LDAP integration is a Enterprise Edition only option link )?
Thanks again for your help!
Sincerely,
Bruno Nunes
I hesitate to share exactly what I was quoted since it’s been a while and I expect the sales staff prefers to consult with each prospect individually. However, I would make a general recommendation that you budget, minimum, a couple hundred thousand dollars per year for an Enterprise implementation. Probably more depending on your scale requirements.
You’re correct about the LDAP integration, it’s one of the Enterprise features. I created a crude replacement by proxying the Dremio instance from inside an isolated network segment, and tying the proxy’s HTTP authorization to a custom python app that validates against AD and sets a cookie indicating a user in good-standing. As long as that cookie is valid, the proxy doesn’t redirect to a login page. Then, on the Dremio login page, I inject Javascript and CSS to alter the DOM and add a hint-box to the page that includes a default user and password to let our investigators bootstrap their own credentials.
Obviously this only works for small, isolated instances of Dremio where you can trust all investigators with administrator privileges. Luckily our use-case allows this since each instance of Dremio is scoped to service a single client. This is also a major reason why the licensing model for non-free Dremio was a nonstarter for us, we’re currenly running 4 entirely separate Dremio instances, with more on the way. When I discussed this with the sales team, we both agreed it was best I stuck with the free version. 
Hi,
I appreciate your feedback regardless.
As I said previously, I wasn’t really asking for a definite “invoice-able” value. Just trying to get an idea of the cost of an enterprise edition solution. It would be better to have a clear “Each Coordinator Node costs X and each Executor Node costs Y” but it appears that’s not Dremio’s M.O.
As for the LDAP integration, I guess “Necessity is the mother of invention”. Nice workaround. Clearly your customers are happy ("…with more on the way.")!
Thanks again for all the help AWaschick!
Sincerely,
Bruno Nunes