Our engineers have been hard at work making Storj an option available for all Splunk users using the Smartstore. We’re excited for this integration as it enables a secure, performant, and privacy focused option for all Splunk users at a fraction of the cost.
What Is Splunk?
Splunk is a powerful software platform that enables you to collect, index, and search all types of data generated by your business. This could be anything from website log files to machine data generated by industrial equipment. With Splunk, you can quickly and easily find the information you need to make better decisions, improve operations, and drive up profits.
Essentially Splunk handles how you interact and make sense of your data, while Storj provides the physical resting place of the data (often referred to as “the cloud”).
What is the Splunk Smartstore?
Splunk Smartstore allows you to expand your local storage that is being used to store data (Splunk indexer data), into your remote cloud store (such as Amazon S3 endpoint). It blends your local and remote storage together so that the data is still searchable and usable, regardless of where it’s located. Another way to think about it is you can configure your backend "store" to be either local/hot or remote/thawed.
The local/hot situation would be a disk on your VPN (virtual private network) or local server with enough space for the indexer data. If you run out of space, you can expand that local volume into the cloud. The Smartstore configuration can be pointed at an Amazon S3 endpoint or Storj’s S3 compatible API. As data usage goes up, it’ll use local space first, then expand into the remote storage (remote/thawed). It's a seamless method of expanding storage without worrying about over provisioning!
As Splunk describes it, Smartstore lets developers “separate compute (CPUs) and data storage to be independently scaled up or down based on business demands.” We’re excited to share that now you can scale your Splunk data with Storj!
What’s the benefit of using Storj?
Storj is much better value than traditional cloud storage solutions which makes it perfect for archiving.
Amazon offers archiving tiers such as Amazon S3 Glacier to save costs, but a typical oversight that business owners make is not calculating retrieval fees. A retrieval fee (or egress) is charged anytime the data is accessed or viewed. Viewing the data just a few times can often end up costing more than the standard tiers. Even then, take a look at some of the costs of standard tiers compared to Storj in the graphic below.
The best part about Storj is you get Glacier-like prices without the costly retrieval fees.
Here are some of the benefits of Storj to keep in mind:
- Affordable: Storj is up to 80% cheaper than traditional solutions that integrate with Splunk.
- Easy to use: Storj is compatible with S3 and is simple to configure with Splunk, so you can get started quickly and effortlessly.
- Secure: Your archived logs are encrypted and stored in a decentralized network, so you can rest assured that they are safe and secure.
- Scalable: Storj can easily scale to meet your needs as your business grows.
Connect Splunk with Storj
Many users of Splunk archive their data to Amazon S3 (a data storage service provided by Amazon). Storj is Amazon S3 API compatible, which means switching from Splunk to Storj only takes changing a few lines of a configuration file usually called indexes.conf.
Here’s what indexes.conf looks like when configured to use Storj:
How to switch Splunk’s storage to Storj
1. Sign up for a free account at https://www.storj.io/signup?partner=splunk
2. Follow our integration guide to configure your Smartstore
3. Enjoy your cost cost savings
That’s it! If you need help with the specifics, make sure to reach out to us, we’re happy to help!
