
Splunk is rapidly growing big data service that is taking on the likes of New Relic and other industry leaders. Splunk can be run in both private and public clouds. With the introduction of Splunk Cloud, the public cloud offering gives organizations the ability to offload their big data tasks into the cloud. Splunk Cloud is making headlines for offering a 100% uptime guarantee onto their service level agreement. If Splunk Cloud goes down, the SLA described financial penalties that will be remitted back to the customer. Splunk Cloud did not have an official service level agreement before their announcement yesterday.
Splunk Cloud is based on AWS. Splunk Cloud also mentioned that in addition to the 100% service level agreement guarantee, they’ve also decided slash prices by 33%. Other perks include virtual development sandboxes for DevOps and plans with higher specifications for management of up to 5 terabytes of data per day. Some analysts wonder why Splunk didn’t drop prices sooner, considering AWS has had more than 40 price cuts in over 5 plus years.
MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson recently talked to InformationWeek about SplunkCloud. In their candid conversations, Fulkerson described Splunk Cloud as being, “Not a difficult problem.” Fulkerson continues on by saying, “Across multiple Amazon availability zones, to set up cloud infrastructure to guarantee uptime, so I’m confident they’ll be able to hit 100% and I don’t think it’s just a BS marketing gimmick.”
Regardless if you think the 100% uptime is a gimmick, its interesting to take note of the amount of companies that have shifted from the 99.9% SLA to the full 100% SLA since they are based on cloud services such as AWS. Splunk Cloud offers their services in levels that correlate the amount of terabytes you need per day and pricing depends upon your organizations level of big data consumption.