[Music] welcome everyone to today's conversation on all about data i have a slightly different format today and i'm really excited to share this with you as we begin today's conversation i acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land i'm on i'm speaking from the land of bidigal people and i pay my respects to the elders past present and emerging so for today our conversation will focus on shared views and experiences as we discuss customers across different industries who are at different stages within their it transformation journeys and for this conversation my guests are two experts across two organizations josh atwell from splunk and raj grewal from the from netapp welcome josh and rajand an interesting fact about today's guest is that joss is currently at splunk having previously worked at neta and raj is currently at nada having previously worked with splunk welcome gentlemen um as an introduction i know i've mentioned your names but hey raj would you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at netapp thank you barsha my name is raj grewal i'm a principal architect here at netapp and i lead a team in all areas of artificial intelligence big data based here in chicago illinois perfect thank you raj and josh would you also introduce yourself to us in the audience please sure my name is josh atwell i'm a senior technology advocate over at splunk i'm living here in raleigh north carolina uh and yeah a previous netapp i was at netapp for a number of years now i'm over at splunk my team is focused on identifying emerging trends how to inform and instruct people on how to perceive those trends and you know find success uh in tackling thosechallenges perfect thanks george i'm not going to let you go just yet with your introduction um i'm going to ask you to tell us a little bit about splunk as well like what is splunk known for withmy previous roles in cyber security i know splunk providesyou know seam solution security information and event management but what should it be known for or what else should it be known for uh yeah that's like the thousand dollar million dollar question uh lots of people know splunk as a logging company a lot of people know us as a security company but what we are is an extensible data platform that allows us to unify security full stack observability and just tons of custom applications and use cases so that organizations can unlock the potential of their data remove those barriers so they can get into action really driving hard to help organizations unlock their innovation andyou know succeed in digital transportation transformation and most importantly my favorite understand what's going on in their environments yeah that's uh that'spretty cool thank you and i asked that because you know even within that app as well for netapp and raj would probably agree to this is we're known as traditional storage vendor as well but you know there's so much more in terms of data um that we're doing so it's always great to ask what are we known for but then you know what else are we actually doing that people might not be aware of um so starting with our conversation and first point of discussion um and you know there's a lot of focus on different aspects of data no doubt and splunk and netapp are companies that help simplify a lot of processes and procedures when it comes to data so i'm very keen to get this conversation started on shared views between josh yourself and raj around what sort of customers do you talk or talk to you know verticals enterprises and umand what conversations are you coming across raj perhaps you can start with this yeah so again working at netapp um it's really great because we get to help customers along their data journey and what does that really mean right most of usyou know think about data as being structured or well organized and maybe easy to do analysis with traditional business tools like something collected and arranged in a database but where i help our customers are with is in the area of unstructured data right so think about like social media posts like twitter or facebook they can have really huge business value but very difficult to do analysis on and then you start expanding that lens now you start throwing in images audio video documents email lists and messages and unstructured data is really rich with potential but it's really difficult to hand and importantly it makes up over 80 percent of the world's data and any organization that's really serious about you know getting insights from their data must find ways to harness it and that's where you know splunk and netapp together we provide a great solution to allow customers uh to get insights from their data yeah thanksraj that kind of builds a really clear picture you know we're talking you're giving us some really good use cases that everybody can understand right um josh isthat something that you come across as well is it different ithink there's a lot of parallels with the conversations that i have also uh one of the things with splunk is we absorb digital exhaust from the environments whether you're in the public cloud whether you're on premises or how most of us are bridging somewhere in between uh all of those components are releasing information and information that professionals need to tap into to be able to get insights to be able to respond uh be able to take care of their environments and deliver for their customers and some of that's structured some of it's not unfortunately we haven't been able to get developers around the world to standardize on exactly how they're going to log everything whether it's on hardware or software um and so the power that we provide with splunk is the capacity to takereally well structured data as well as unstructured data and be able to help youcorrelate those together to get insights yeah well that's uh it's really falling into place right with netapp where we're helping get the data look at it you know probably even uh put it in an ai ml sort of thing whereas youknow splunk is coming in to look at the data and make info you know bring information out of it how do you make actionable information out of all of that data so this is really great and um it's interesting josh you already touched on cloud and my second question was going to be you know we know our customers all customers that we talk to splunk netapp they'remost of them are in a certain it transformation journey and a lot of that involves cloud um when they start in cloud where they're going to cloud where they've got partly cloud you know um with that what are the majority of conversations that are happening in your interaction when it comes to you know cloud sure well as much as i hate doing it the last two years and has really disrupted not only the way businesses operate but the way they thought they were going to handle their digital transformations the way they were going to handle their cloud migrations and that journey um but in the research that i've done recently while at splunk we've also identified that people are also kind of accepting that hybrid cloud's going to be a long term scenario where that journey to get a lot of those applications and you know the things that help run their business it's going to take a while for them to get there so understanding how to operate with one foot in the data center and their heads in the clouds and i mean that you know nicely um is tobe able to um how do you look at those and find standardization find mechanisms so you can simplify your operations uh centralize your visibility and understand that as applications move there um you know your operatingmodel can also shift and it can do that hopefully as seamlessly as possibleyeah thanks josh and um with you raj is that the sort of conversation you're coming across as well the hybrid cloud yeah but i think regardless whether you're talking about in the cloud or in a private cloud in a hosted facility or inside on-premise in a data center most organizations want three things right from their it infrastructure they want performance at scale they want faster recovery from failure and overall they want to lower tco of the environment and if you actually take it even one step further you know you have two sets of folks you have application owners you have it infrastructure right and the app owners they just want to make sure hey from a data point of view is my data in the right location at the right time and on the right storage tier and it's not like ssds or you know spinning disk it's more of there's data they need now and there's data they need three months from now when they're being audited for example and then you have it what they want is i need a data platform that can manage unstructured data at scale make sure it's secure durable i can integrate with multiple workflows and also reduce cost at the same time yeah i love it i love the fact that you're brought in back to you know the key drivers for a business um you know what is it that they're trying to achieve um i love it so why are customers using netapp and splunk yeah that one's pretty straightforward uhyou know one there's been great partnership between netapp and splunk for a long time um but splunk has worked to incorporate capabilities that allow our self-managed on-prem customers to operate very similarly as they do in the cloud using protocols that are important to them that they use in the cloud for instance s3 you know for a storage standpoint because as raj pointed out correctly cost is a factor retention policies are important and not everything needs to be on you know high-speed ssd and so being able to leverage s3 protocols that are identical to what they use intheir cloud services has become really important for them in their self-managed on-prem environments as well yeah raj would you like to add to that yeah so again when folks are architecting a splunk environment again if you go back from those two stakeholders the splunk admin and the data center team you know the ability to have some sort of data tiering engine to put data on the right media or the right data center and or protection scheme make sure that data is durable right um you know netapp we have several products where you can get 15 9's of durability um people also want something that's scalable right something that can providesupport for over 200 billion objects but then also from the i.t point of view you know netapp we have tons of products and services that are flexibleand simple to deploy right i can mix and match maybe software versus hardware appliances um hybrid cloud enabled right be able to store data into public cloud such as aws microsoft azure or gcp and then again also that flexible data policy data protection right make sure that data can be protected and replicated um and also you'd like it from a security point of view right i want maybe at rest or in flight data verification because i think one thing it's one that's the set the hidden s right everyone knows have to talk about security but no one ever wants to really talk about it and together netapp and splunk we cover all those bases yeah awesome um i've got one last question for um customers considering splunk self-managed um whatare what should they think about what should their key considerations be uh yeah well i'm always going to be an advocate at you know being mindful about what your requirements are because the cloud is providing some tremendous value from an operations standpoint and the ability for managed but recognizing that on-prem is still an absolute requirement for a lot of our customers and i think raj is actually hit on a lot of those you need to make sure that you're understanding what your data requirements are what data you're trying to bring in the type of that data that is your retention policies and how frequently you need to access it so that you understand what reliability metrics you need and then also understanding what volume of data that you're needing to maintain um you know in those availability zones or inthose speed and access zones so i think those are some key considerations perfect well thank you josh in raj um for this very insightful conversation i've loved it i'm sure our audience will love it too and um toour audience we'll share a solution brief on splunk smart store powered by netapp um and also i'll leave the audience with a question you know what does self-managed mean to you andhow are you running your critical environment if you have any questions please reach out to any of us in the panel today and we look forward to connecting with you [Music]you