The following is a guest blog post from Cory Minton, Principal Systems Engineer, Dell EMC…
Grab your hoodies, your witty black t-shirts, and maybe your capes…it’s time for another exciting Splunk .conf2016, the annual Splunk User Conference taking place at the Walt Disney Swan and Dolphin Resort September 26-29, 2016. All of us at EMC are excited to be sponsoring .conf for the third year in a row, and this year our presence will be bigger and better than ever before. Dell EMC will host two technical sessions this year, we’ll have more than 20 of the Dell EMC Splunk Ninjas running around learning, a large booth in the partner pavilion demonstrating our technology solutions, and we are pleased to have been nominated for this year’s Revolution Award.
For all the details, check out our EMC at Splunk .conf16 site.
This year marked the formal beginning of a great relationship between two awesome tech companies: Dell EMC and Splunk. We joined forces through a formal strategic alliance that started in February. This alliance enables Dell EMC and its partners to sell Splunk’s industry leading platform. It allows Dell EMC unique access to Splunk technical resources for solution design, testing, and validation. Most importantly, it creates a framework for these two technology powerhouses to collaborate more effectively for customer success.
Why Dell EMC for Splunk?
When we talk about customer success, we mean it in two distinct ways centered around Splunk on Dell EMC, using Splunk to derive value from your Dell EMC infrastructure.
First, we believe success is deploying Splunk on a flexible infrastructure that not only helps Splunk run fast and efficiently, but also one that can scale easily as the usage of Splunk evolves in a customer organization. We believe strongly that converged and hyper-converged technologies powered by Dell EMC’s robust portfolio of storage technologies delivers on this vision and provides additional enterprise capabilities:
- Cost effective & Optimized Storage – Dell EMC delivers optimized and efficient storage by aligning the right storage to Splunk’s hot, warm, and cold data long retention and varying performance requirements.
- Flexible & Scale-Out capacity consumption model – Scale-out infrastructure to meet capacity and compute requirements independently or as a single, converged platform as per your data growth.
- Data Reduction & other data Powerful Enterprise Capabilities – including secure encryption, compression & deduplication of indexes, and fast, efficient zero-overhead copies for protection.
Bottom-less cold bucket – Scale-Out storage platforms, whether on premise or in the cloud, obviates the need for a frozen bucket by providing a PB-scale cold bucket solution, simplifying data management and making data always searchable.
Splunk and Dell EMC engineering teams have engaged in a strategic collaboration to ensure that all Dell EMC platforms have been validated by Splunk to “meet or exceed Splunk’s published reference server hardware” guidelines. The Splunk team takes this validation process very seriously and customers can rest assured that if they are considering infrastructure for your Splunk deployment, we have done extensive testing. Whether you are looking at hyper-converged solutions like VXRail or VxRack, converged solutions like VBlock systems, or just storage from EMC like ScaleIO, XtremIO, VNX, Unity, Isilon, or ECS, you can be confident that the work has been done by both Splunk and Dell EMC to make sure it runs well.
Secondly, we believe Splunk is an incredibly powerful platform for capturing and deriving value from machine data. As it turns out, Dell EMC products spin off a massive amount of “digital exhaust” that can be captured easily and used to drive operational intelligence in IT. Dell EMC has made massive investments over the last few years to build apps for our platforms and make them available in Splunkbase for free. We’ve built apps for XtremIO, Isilon, VNX, vBlock and have many more in the works. These apps (along with the associated TAs for your Ninjas out there) make it simple to ingest data from Dell EMC platforms, and we offer useful, prebuilt reports and dashboards to make monitoring these assets simple. And it doesn’t stop there…once you have the data from your Dell EMC platforms, the underlying searches powering our reports or just the indexes themselves can be used in investigations across the entire IT service stack. One of my favorite things to hear from our customers is the exciting ways they use the apps beyond just simple reporting and I hope to hear many more stories this year at .conf2016.
Dell EMC @ .conf2016
It is this two-way value stream that I am excited to share at .conf with all of my fellow Ninjas. Dell EMC will have two great sessions that highlight some of the values Dell EMC delivers to Splunk customers outlined above. However, the main focus of our sessions are around the deep technical learnings of deploying Splunk at scale on Dell EMC platforms and exciting ways to leverage Dell EMC apps for Splunk in your IT operations and security use cases, including LIVE DEMOS! These sessions are being delivered by Dell EMC Principal Systems Engineers Dean Jackson and Cory Minton along with some super smart Splunk engineers, Jenny Hollfelder and Simon O’Brien.
Check out the abstracts for the sessions below:
Buckets Full of Happy Tiers – Scale-Out Enterprise Infrastructure and Splunk Apps for Deploying Massive and Efficient Splunk Environments
Tuesday, September 27, 2016 | 5:25 PM-6:10 PM / Room Dolphin A3
Jenny Hollfelder, Sales Engineer, Global Strategic Alliances, Splunk Inc.
Cory Minton, Principal SE, Dell EMC
Bring the tissues and be ready for buckets of happy tiers (of scale out infrastructure for Splunk, that is!). We are going to show you how to build efficient, high performance Splunk deployments on enterprise infrastructure. These deployments intelligently leverage Splunk designs for data management and allow you to Splunk all that infrastructure too…feels like we just made a full circle there. That’s kind of the point. We will show you the enterprise-class Splunk solutions EMC has built across its storage and converged platforms portfolios, give you a real-world demonstration on how to use the freely available EMC apps for Splunk Enterprise to troubleshoot and gain additional operational insight into your environment, AND give you some great best practices we’ve learned to make your Splunk and EMC environments perform at their very best. Seriously, come join us to find out more!Bucket Diversity: Choosing Your Search Mate Wisely
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 | 11:00 AM -11:45 AM / Room Dolphin A1
Dean Jackson, Principal Systems Engineer, Dell EMC
Simon O’Brien, Staff Sales Engineer, Splunk
800 IOPs? How do I design for that? Splunk buckets now have so many infrastructure options (local or shared, “flashy” or not, and now even data reduction), that it can be a bit confusing. We will reveal the anatomy of a Splunk bucket from the storage perspective, discuss what kind of workload the Splunk platform truly generates between ingestion and search, and ultimately, arm you with the knowledge to size your buckets wisely.
As you can clearly see from the abstract, these sessions are the technical evidence to back up my previous statements:
1. Splunk just runs better on Dell EMC.
2. You should absolutely be Splunking (yes, that is a verb) your Dell EMC platforms for operational intelligence.
Dell EMC Splunk Ninjas
If you want more detail about either concept, we will have a host of the Dell EMC Splunk Ninja team at the show. The Dell EMC Splunk Ninja team is a group of more than 40 systems engineers from across Dell EMC who have been trained the same way Splunk trains its own systems engineers. The Ninjas hold certifications ranging from SE1 all the way to SE3, we’ve got skills across not only using Splunk, but administering and architecting it at scale. This is a global team not only available to talk to you at .conf, but also available in the field to have direct conversations with you when you head back to the office.
This Dell EMC Splunk Ninja team is so awesome, in fact, that we were nominated for the Splunk Partner Revolution Award. This award recognizes people and teams who use Splunk to drive transformation within their organization and we are pleased to have been nominated for the great work the Dell EMC Splunk Ninja Team does to drive a revolution inside Dell EMC.
Throughout .conf2016, the Ninja Team will be hanging out in the source=*Pavilion (that’s the Partner Pavilion for those of you who are new to Splunk) ready to demo our apps, talk about deploying Splunk at scale efficiently on Dell EMC’s enterprise-class platforms, or just have a conversation with you about why Splunk is so awesome…or about Ninja shoes and the weird need to separate that big toe. Join us in the great sessions and hang out with us in the Pavilion as we will have some really cool t-shirts to give away along with some great prizes (hint – finding Dell EMC Splunk Ninjas will be key to the best prizes…especially at Search Party). We will see you all in Orlando very soon, don’t make your plans without stopping at our .conf16 site.
Happy Splunking!
Thanks,
Cory Minton
Principal Systems Engineer
Dell EMC
Follow all the conversations coming out of #splunkconf16!