Amit Rawlani, Director of Solutions & Technology Alliances, Cloudian
Increase Flexibility and Decrease TCO for Splunk with Hyperconverged Deployments on VMware vCF for Tanzu
By Amit Rawlani
Today, organizations face new challenges due to increasing demand for IT resources, widespread adoption of public cloud, and proliferation of next-gen applications. As an IT executive in charge of your data infrastructure, including the infrastructure for Splunk, you understand the dilemma of burgeoning and expensive infrastructure storage. Splunk is costly but keeping the ever-increasing amount of Splunk indexed data on expensive storage on indexers is costlier. Yet, you need to retain and analyze as much data as possible to stay competitive. With VMware-Splunk-Cloudian partnership, you have access to a modern infrastructure designed to address this dilemma.
Challenge:
The main issue with the classic Splunk environment is the cost. The Splunk license while expensive, is typically less than half the cost of the storage infrastructure required. This is because the Hot(1-7 days) and Warm(30-60-90 days) buckets reside on expensive storage on or directly attached to the indexers itself and the Cold(>90 days) buckets reside on accessible storage like NAS systems, which can also get very expensive. This also creates the issue of shared fate, where scalability of storage and processing are tied at the hip, making it extremely expensive. It also introduces the issue of long storage rebuilds if an indexer fails making it risky to operate.
Elegant Solution
Splunk’s next-gen architecture, Splunk SmartStore, is based on the architecture of the Splunk cloud and overcomes these challenges. It leverages S3-compatible object storages, like Cloudian HyperStore, to provide an exabyte-scalable pool of storage for indexed data which is separated and external to the indexers. The Indexers retain the newly indexed data only in Hot(1-7 days) buckets, with all the Warm(> 7days) buckets are moved onto Cloudian HyperStore. There is no need for a Clod bucket anymore. This way, all older data resides in the cost-effective Cloudian cluster.
Where does Hyperconverged come in?
While Splunk SmartStore with Cloudian reduces the overall TCO, it does create separate infrastructure tranches (indexers and storage), introducing management complexity. That’s where a running the solution on Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) from VMware makes the solution manageable.
VMware vCloud Foundation (vCF) for Tanzu, a Cloud-Native, HCI platform for compute and storage, simplifies IT operations allowing enterprises to run traditional and modern applications on the tried and test VMware stack. VMware vCF for Tanzu allows running Splunk SmartStore solution with Cloudian the same HCI platform, while keeping storage and processing scalability separated, thus simplifying infrastructure management while reducing the overall TCO by >44%.
Benefits of Running Splunk SmartStore with Cloudian on a VMware vCF for Tanzu
Deploying the Splunk solution in this manner offers several benefits for IT administrators:
Increase Flexibility: With classic Splunk architecture, indexer processing and storage intertwine at the hip. This rigid framework undermines scalability, complicates IT operations, and creates several challenges. Switching to Splunk SmartStore with Cloudian object storage running on Cloud-native HCI by VMware Tanzu addresses the scalability and manageability issues to increase flexibility.
Lower TCO: As an IT Administrator, you can run Splunk SmartStore with Cloudian on a Hyperconverged architecture with a lower TCO. Deploying SmartStore with Cloudian in the VMware Tanzu, you can achieve 44% TCO savings within three years.
Simplifying Operations: Mundane storage tasks like provisioning storage are time-consuming. Cloud-native, HCI from VMware to deploy Splunk Smartstore simplifies IT administration by providing operations, governance, and ease of management.
Bottom Line
The Cloudian-VMware-Splunk partnership has delivered the next-gen Splunk solution in a hyperconverged, cloud-native architecture. Organizations can now leverage Cloudian with Splunk SmartStore deployed on VMware HCI to reduce TCO and increase flexibility. For detailed information about this solution, click this link to watch the full webinar video.
Meta Description
Are you frustrated by high data storage costs? Learn how to leverage Cloudian and VMware with hyperconverged Splunk deployments to reduce TCO and increase flexibility.
