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    Splunk Brings Visibility to Virtualization

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    What Business Leaders Need to Know About Virtualization

    To really succeed with virtualization, IT organizations need to be able to tightly manage the convergence of servers, storage and networking. Accomplishing that, however, requires being able to coordinate massive amounts of machine data to identify the source of any particular performance issue.

    At the VMworld 2013 conference this week, Splunk demonstrated the latest version of its Big Data search engine platform for discovering that data. Designed to be easier to install and configure, Leena Joshi, senior director of solutions marketing, says Splunk App for VMware 3.0 gives administrators visibility into both the physical and virtual elements of the IT environment.

    That’s important, says Joshi, because it speeds the mean time to resolution of IT problems in a way that helps eliminate all the finger-pointing that occurs in complex IT environments every time a problem occurs.

    As part of that effort, Splunk has integrated Splunk App for VMware with vSphere to pull data out of VMware environments, in addition to publishing an application programming interface that makes it easier to share that information with other applications.

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    On the one hand, virtualization makes it easier to manage IT by essentially abstracting the complexity of the underlying physical infrastructure. But when something does go wrong, virtualization also introduces a layer of software that obfuscates what exactly is happening with the physical infrastructure. As such, IT organizations need tools that help them coordinate events across virtual software rather than the underlying physical IT infrastructure.

    It’s inevitable that as these tools emerge, less specialization will be required within the IT environment in favor of a more automated approach where administrators focus more on managing specific workloads across both virtual and physical infrastructure.

    Of course, none of that can really occur until the IT organization has the tools to make it happen.

    Mike Vizard
    Mike Vizard
    Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.

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