SwiftStack sees their new partnership with Spunk around the new SmartStore feature within the Splunk Enterprise platform as offering enormous new opportunities for SwiftStack, in making them attractive to customers who would never have considered them before.

ORLANDO – At the Splunk .conf18 event here, Spunk significantly upgraded the Splunk Enterprise platform with a new feature, SmartStore. Multi-cloud data management vendor Swiftstack announced Day One support for SmartStore, which makes SwiftStack a validated target for Splunk data, providing significantly improved infrastructure capacity at a significantly lower cost.

The relationship between the two companies is a brand new one.

“We are here at .conf18 because of a new partnership with Splunk around their new SmartStore,” said Greg Govatos, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at SwiftStack. “Splunk asked us to participate in the early access program for SmartStore, and we have been in it for about four months, which allows us to announce our support at the time of launch.

Splunk SmartStore is a new feature in Splunk Enterprise 7.2 to maximize data management flexibility by allowing compute CPU and storage to be  decoupled and independently scaled when the customer desires to do so.

“SmartStore allows Splunk customers to build a more flexible data management structure behind Splunk Enterprise,” Govatos said. “It does this without compromising search performance. It also lets it reside in a cost-effective storage tier through Amazon S3. It’s a huge plus for customers because it delivers both lower cost and lower complexity.”

SwiftStack’s being a validated target allows them to store warm Splunk data through the S3 API.

“It allows Splunk customers to use Splunk for more use cases and more data sources, and to retain Splunk data for longer – much longer if needed,” Govatos stated. “Splunk charges the customer when they ingest a piece of data. It doesn’t matter how long you keep it. This cuts the cost of storing the data, to allow for longer term retention, like storing sales data across multiple seasons, as well as keeping things for compliance reasons. It has great utility.”

SwiftStack is not the only validated SmartStore vendor out of the gate, but there are not a lot of them. AWS, Dell EMC, Pure Storage, and NetApp are the others.

Govatos said that while this integration is significant for Splunk customers, it’s also very significant for SwiftStack.

“It opens up a new market to customers who may not have looked at us before,” he said. “This appeals to organizations who already have a big Splunk deployment, but who see a need to grow the amount of Splunk data that they store significantly. We spoke to one customer at this show who is presently  ingesting a few hundred GB of Splunk a day. Their goal is to increase that to 25 TB a day. Through traditional means, the infrastructure tax would be so high that the project would not be viable. This makes it feasible. This is a significant customer – a Fortune 100 company – which is not in our core list of verticals at all. It’s the kind of opportunity that would never have been open to us before.”

The partnership is also a significant opportunity for SwiftStack channel partners.

“This is a fundamental change to Splunk’s data management model,” Govatos said. “As a result, customers will have a lot of questions. Those are the kinds of questions best handled by Splunk integrator partners. There are 14 Elite Splunk integrator partners in North America. All of them get the story immediately. We have spoken to about a half dozen of these at this event, and all we have talked to are bringing us into their existing analytics practice.”

Govatos said that SmartStore is also of great value to SwiftStack as an affirmation of their core value proposition.

“Customers want to retain data longer, but infrastructure has been an inhibitor,” he said. “With this, they can move forward without these limitations. SmartStore is also something that Splunk has spent a couple of years developing. It’s a serious endeavor for them.”

SwiftStack’s integration with SmartStore is being demonstrated this week at SwiftStack’s booth, M30, at .conf18.