D

Data Lake

Definition

A data lake is a centralized storage repository that holds raw data in its native format until needed for analytics. Unlike data warehouses that store structured, pre-processed data, data lakes accept structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data at any scale. Data lakes typically run on object storage (S3, Azure Blob) or HDFS, with query engines like Apache Spark, Presto/Trino, or Databricks processing data on demand.

Daniel Kovacs
Written by
Daniel Kovacs
Updated Feb 11, 2026

Related Terms

A

Ansible

An open-source IT automation tool for configuration management and orchestration, widely used for HPC cluster and data center provisioning.
B

BeeGFS

A high-performance parallel file system with distributed metadata, simple administration, and built-in high availability for HPC and AI workloads.
B

Burst Buffer

A fast intermediate storage layer using NVMe SSDs that absorbs I/O bursts between compute nodes and the parallel file system.
C

Ceph

An open-source distributed storage platform providing unified object, block, and file storage with automatic data distribution and self-healing capabilities.
C

CXL

Compute Express Link — an open interconnect standard enabling high-speed communication and memory sharing between CPUs, accelerators, and memory devices.
D

Deduplication

A data reduction technique that eliminates duplicate data blocks, significantly reducing storage consumption in backup and primary storage systems.