Blogs: cloud

An emerging generation of developers and cloud consumers don’t want delayed gratification. They expect everything they need available as a service. They want easy turn-on/turn-off. They want to pay based on usage. To meet the needs of this new class of customers, we re-worked our familiar classic Splunk into a brand-spanking-new cloud service called Splunk Storm!

Will be speaking Thursday, July 21, at a Netsuite panel as part of the webinar titled “Keys to Evaluating Cloud ERP.” At Splunk we graduated from our initial accounting package to Netsuite a couple of years ago, and are now expanding our implementation to establish legal entities globally, after completing a second study this year to determine that we are on the right platform for the company. ERP to us encompasses Financial business applications including core accounting modules, plus order entry. For these applications our primary concern was to select and implement comprehensive, secure, flexible, solid software that would last us 3-5 years and beyond as we grow rapidly, worldwide. Netsuite fit that profile and was…

NOTE:   There is a new and updated post on this topic located here.

Over the past year, Splunk has increased it’s footprint for installations on Amazon EC2.  Along with this, come questions about best practices and recommendations for deploying in a cloud environment.   In this post, I’ll provide some guidance around deploying Splunk on EC2.  It is important to note that the search and indexing load will dictate the hardware requirement.  The following link contains the appropriate guidelines for sizing:   HERE

Let us first review our ‘reference’ server configuration for a deployment that indexes 10-100 GB per day:

• 8 cores (2 quad core, > 2.5 GHz)
• 8+ GB RAM
• RAID 1+0 Disk

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Greetings> Am so happy and proud to be the new CIO at Splunk. I knew this was the right company during the interview cycle between the point when we went thorough an awesome product demo, and a point near the close, when I was informed of the need to move kegs and surf boards from my new desk area.  Not only was this going to be a fun place, but it was also apparent that Splunk had adopted a cloud and open source based approach to sourcing IT solutions, which is very much in line with my philosophy.

In this space I plan to discuss the world according to me, as our CIO, and focus remarks towards the new realities…

I recently returned from ISACA’s Information Security and Risk Management Conference in Las Vegas and of the 36 sessions offered on security and compliance, seven were on the topic security and compliance for cloud services.  There were several key take-aways that I found interesting:

• Cloud computing is analogous to the 1800s when every factory had to generate it’s own electrical power for manufacturing.  Once electricity generation was moved to a utility (in the cloud), economies of scale drove generation costs out of the business and gave the business on-demand elasticity for electricity.
• Gartner is predicting that (due to the spread of cloud computing) 25% of companies will no longer have IT departments in 2012.
• Cloud security will be baked

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My fellow blogger and roustabout Savio Rodrigues has posted something interesting over at the Open Sources blog:

One of open source’s promises is to minimize vendor lock-in. However, it’s not so apparent that this value proposition holds when using software as a service (SaaS) or cloud-based platform services.

This is a great point and one we discussed at great length at last night’s Open Cloud Meetup here at Splunk HQ. One of the topics we covered was how open source seems less relevant in a cloud-y, saas-y world. Sure, everyone loves to participate in Open Source communities. While Splunk has never defined itself as an Open Source company or released…

I stumbled upon this unexpected post from Chad Sakac of EMC talking about the VMware/EMC/Cisco collaboration.

For anyone who has spent their career on the start-up track in Silicon Valley this is not a novel story.

Isn’t it fantastic to see some large companies still have the mojo of entrepreneurship and fast moving initiatives that survive outside of the normal organizational structure?

While it remains to be seen how successful VCE, Acadia and Vblock will be, it sure is exciting to have the industry talking about radically new approaches to simplify computing! Here is a great post summarizing Vblock from Mark Bowker @ Enterprise Strategy Group. Now if we can only get access to that…

In the last episode of the Splunk Ninja series, Cloud Power, I gave a quick overview of Amazon’s EC2 Cloud Computing services and what they can be used for. In this episode I go in to a functional tour of where I’m at with EC2 today. As many know, I use EC2 for quick, flexible, full-control demos–a bit different of an approach and purpose than the demo’s we have on our website.

In response to the “Cloud Power” episode, Jeff Barr at the Amazon Web Services blog liked my demo video and pointed out how I made a comment the “there’s no pretty GUI” and I should check out the Elasticfox browser plugin. To Jeff@AWS, “thanks for…

I’m a big fan of cloud computing. Amazon has put together a very usable pile of computing services with their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The ability to quickly provision server computing resources in a pay-to-play virtual environment is right up my alley! This video gives background on EC2, and demonstrates how fast I can get one of my Splunk Amazon EC2 images up and running. Having your own set of preconfigured images is very handy depending on your use case. I have one for the Interop data, one for Splunk Preview releases, and a few more for other configurations.

Anecdotally, I was out at a prospect and did a demo on my EC2 image in the cloud, as I often…