The following is copped from a support email by Stephen Sorkin who is the man behind the splunk server curtain … thought it should go broader.

I’m the manager of the search and indexing team at Splunk. We’re still in the process of writing up our findings from storage benchmarks but here are the general details.

High IO/s typically means both faster indexing in general and faster searching of rare, temporally incoherent events. On average, we’ve seen indexing speeds increase by about 66% going from an 7200 RPM SATA RAID to a 15K RPM SCSI RAID. We’ve seen comparable performance from SCSI and SAS RAIDs, provided they’re 15K RPM.

The best best benchmarking tool we’ve found for measuring how Splunk will behave on your disk hardware is bonnie++. If your disk subsystem can sustain 800 IO/s, you’re in good shape.

Hey all,

It’s taken longer than we would have liked but our 3rd preview build has been posted.
Get’um here

A bunch of work has gone into windows stability, tons of bugs were fixed, and a bunch of customer requests have been implemented ( we will let you know out of band ). We expect that this release should be more stable, slightly faster, and less buggy.

Left to do, we still have a bunch of IE work, performance improvements, and cleaning up of some features like interactive field extraction and event type discovery.

Its still not production ready so don’t even think of trying it out for real - and there is no guarantee that migration will work from a preview to GA ( we will migrate from 3.1.x to GA but not preview ). Also, don’t run splunk as root - its just not good to do until we run through all our testing.

As always, please send us feedback at splunkpreview@splunk.com or hit us up on IRC (irc.efnet.org #splunk).
The last round of info from Preview #2 was awesome please keep it up!

e.