The advantages of running Splunk on HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition

[StorageExperts]

Discover how HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition simplifies your Splunk infrastructure, while at the same time keeping your environment flexible and cost efficient. – By Keith Vanderford, Storage Solutions engine, HPE

Spending too much of your time extracting valuable insights from your data instead of managing complex infrastructure? The answer: HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition to provide a simple, flexible, and efficient infrastructure solution to host your Splunk application. You get cloud-like agility in your on-premises deployment at a much lower cost than the public cloud.

HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition delivers a feature-rich cloud experience with self-service management that is enabled from a single cloud-native global dashboard that scales autonomously with the infrastructure. Private Cloud Business Edition provides everything you need at your fingertips to globally deploy, manage, upgrade, and optimize your entire fleet of virtual machines (VMs) and infrastructure — anywhere in the world, from any location and on any device. Because this solution is multisite and multi-cluster aware, managing hundreds of systems across geographies is as simple as managing just one locally.

All this is available either in a self-managed on-premises deployment delivered as a factory-integrated solution, or as a fully managed service via Private Cloud Business Edition, with on-premises consumption-based pricing and a self-service experience.

Now on to talk about the topic at hand, Splunk. Whichever of these implementations you choose, HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition is the perfect infrastructure for making the most of your Splunk deployment.

Bring flexibility to your Splunk environment

Splunk use cases, workloads, and business needs are specific to each deployment, so a one-size-fits-all approach does not work for creating a Splunk environment. That is why HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition is a perfect fit for Splunk. It provides the flexibility for fast deployment and better resource utilization, regardless of the size of your deployment.

HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition is supported by HPE Alletra 6000, HPE Alletra MP, and HPE SimpliVity Gen11. This gives you the ability to choose the best storage array to suit your business requirements. Each option provides an extraordinarily resilient platform that is always-on.

Add value with your Splunk infrastructure

Private Cloud Business Edition provides ultra-high reliability, low latency, high performance, and the AI-driven cross-stack analytics of HPE InfoSight to help you intelligently manage your environment. With single-pane-of-glass administration from the vCenter user interface, you are empowered to rapidly deploy and retire resources as needed. Resource deployment can be further streamlined and simplified with policy and template driven automation.

Splunk deployments often experience unpredictable growth with compute and storage needs increasing at different rates. The continuous monitoring of both short-term and long-term growth trends by HPE InfoSight gives you intelligent recommendations to accommodate this growth and keep your Splunk deployment running smoothly. The recommendations from HPE InfoSight help you anticipate the need for increased storage or compute capacity in your indexers or search heads before you become resource constrained. The disaggregated nature of the solution enables compute and storage resources to be added independently and non-disruptively, ensuring higher utilization of all your resources, with no downtime, no overprovisioning, and no trapped capacity.

Lower TCO for your Splunk deployment

HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition makes management of your Splunk environment simple, and helps lower your TCO through better utilization of hardware resources and lower costs for administration. By using the familiar VMware vCenter^® user interface and a custom HPE plug-in to manage the entire solution from a single pane of glass, managing and scaling Private Cloud Business Edition is simple and straightforward.

With HPE Private Cloud Business Edition, users can implement a fully virtualized Splunk stack that significantly reduces the infrastructure footprint, resulting in lower overall TCO. Infrastructure costs are held in check and TCO is reduced through better utilization of hardware and reduced cost of administration. With higher utilization, your overall deployment requires less hardware, which means less rack space, less floor space, and reduced power consumption — all resulting in lower TCO. Costly downtime can be avoided altogether due to the predictive analytics of HPE InfoSight that warn you to replace degraded components before they fail.

Maximize Splunk uptime

HPE InfoSight is built into HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, giving you AI-powered predictive analytics and trend analysis which help you predict and prevent disruptions in your infrastructure. The recommendations from HPE InfoSight enable you to replace degraded components before they fail, and help you predict and prevent downtime due to pending disk failure, Splunk node failure, and other types of failures in the environment. In addition, the analysis and recommendations from HPE InfoSight can significantly reduce the time required to isolate and resolve performances issues. All of this helps you maximize your Splunk uptime.

Private Cloud Business Edition provides higher durability for Splunk’s indexer nodes and search heads. This means your Splunk instances are less likely to fail, giving you more predictable and consistent performance of your Splunk deployment with fewer disruptions. Splunk’s indexed data is protected from component and node failures by triple-parity data protection on the storage platform, in addition to the index replication that is a normal part of Splunk indexer cluster operation.

Streamline deployment of distributed Splunk environments

With HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, you can easily and quickly deploy a large number of Splunk instances for distributed deployments. An administrator can set up a single virtual machine (VM) and install the operating system (OS), install Splunk, and create the initial configuration of Splunk, including tasks such as accepting the trial license, creating a Splunk admin user, opening the necessary ports in the firewall, and setting the IP address for DHCP. After finishing, the administrator would clone that partially configured VM to a template in a content library.

When ready to deploy the whole environment, a non-admin user could simply create many VMs from the template at the same time with just a few clicks by using the “Create Virtual Machine” wizard in Private Cloud Business Edition. All that remains to do is assign the role for each node (either in server.conf or through Splunk Web), apply the full Splunk license and point all instances to the license manager, and build the cluster of indexers and a search head cluster if required.

Splunk SmartStore solutions at scale

HPE supports three different Splunk SmartStore configurations that can be fully integrated with Private Cloud Business Edition. All three of these solutions use HPE Scalable Object Storage with Scality RING running on HPE Alletra 4000 Storage Servers. You get all the flexibility, capacity, performance, and upgradeability you need to implement a Splunk SmartStore solution that is not only the right size at the right price now but can easily and inexpensively grow as your requirements change.

The three options for Splunk SmartStore include:

1. Single-site configuration
2. Multi-site configuration with Scality RING in a stretched configuration providing a single namespace and synchronous replication of objects between sites
3. Multi-site configuration with a Scality RING object store on each site, each having a separate and unique namespace with asynchronous replication of objects between sites

HPE Private Cloud Business Edition is a software-defined infrastructure built on HPE Alletra all-flash storage arrays and HPE ProLiant Servers. It is designed to be resilient, simple to deploy and manage – with consistently high performance and cost efficiency. HPE makes your infrastructure effortless so you can spend less time managing resources and more time innovating for your business.

Check out this paper to learn more about the benefits of deploying Splunk on HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition.   

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Meet Storage Experts blogger Keith Vanderford, Storage Solutions engine, HPE

Keith is on the worldwide storage solutions team at HPE with more than 15 years of experience with HPE storage products. For the past several years, he’s focused primarily on running data analytics software with HPE Storage.

Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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