Splunk Enterprise is a leading platform for analyzing machine-generated data to gain valuable business insights. Splunk Enterprise uses its powerful Splunk Search Processing Language (SPL) to extract meaningful information from machine data. The insights that are generated from analyzing machine data are called operational intelligence, which has many use cases, including:

• IT operations—Utilization, capacity growth
• Security—Fraud detection, real-time detection of threats, forensics
• Internet of Things (IoT)—Sensor data, machine-to-machine, human interactions

Dell Technologies and Splunk have partnered to provide jointly validated reference architectures that are optimized for maximum scalability and performance. Splunk software running on Dell converged infrastructure delivers the operational intelligence that is required to drive an organization’s digital transformation.

Dell Technologies provides the following primary benefits to customers’ Splunk Enterprise environments:

• Optimized storage data tiering—Aligns storage to hot/warm, cold, and frozen data requirements with high retention and performance.
• Cost-effectiveness and flexible scale-out—Provides scale-out capacity and compute, independently or as a single, converged platform.
• Powerful data services—Includes secure encryption, compression and deduplication, and fast, efficient snapshots for protection.

A reference architecture using a VxRail system with Dell Isilon for a virtualized Splunk Enterprise environment has been jointly tested and validated by Splunk and Dell Technologies. The architecture meets or exceeds the performance of Splunk Enterprise running on Splunk's documented reference hardware. VxRail offers the performance and capacity required to meet the infrastructure requirements of a small or medium-sized enterprise Splunk deployment.

For more information, see Splunk Reference Architecture on VxRail.