Guest Blog from Friea Berg, Global Strategic Alliances, Splunk

As a member of the Splunk Global Strategic Alliances organization, Friea Berg is responsible for Splunk's overall Cisco partnership. She leads a cross-functional team driving core technology alignment, solution development, GTM initiatives, and sales strategies across Cisco Data Center, Security, ACI, Collaboration and IoE teams. Friea has more than 15 years of technology marketing and sales experience with a proven track record of building successful joint solutions with Cisco, NetApp, Microsoft, Red Hat, and other technology leaders. 

Over the past decade Splunk has closely aligned with Cisco to help organizations gain real-time insights across the vast amounts of data generated by Cisco's industry-leading security, networking, data center, wireless, and collaboration portfolios. Thousands of joint customers -including Cisco itself -use Splunk to correlate Cisco data with machine data across their infrastructure, enabling them to minimize operational and security risks, drive informed decisions, and ultimately transform their business.

We've also focused on optimizing Splunk software deployments on Cisco UCS to take advantage of UCS's incredible performance, scalability, and TCO. Cisco UCS's ability to support exponential growth across data volumes, simultaneous users and demanding use cases has been proven in Splunk Enterprise performance benchmark assessments. For example, the latest release of Splunk software was shown to complete searches up to six times faster then the previous release when tested on a 32-core Cisco UCS system.

To enable fast, predictable Splunk deployments Cisco has published multiple reference architectures plus a full Cisco Validated Design that provides prescriptive, step-by-step deployment guidance for Splunk Enterprise on UCS. Cisco UCS is also the only server platform with a Splunk supported integration!

Most recently Splunk and Cisco have collaborated to deliver solutions for:

• IT Operations Analytics to help organizations find and fix problems faster with end-to-end visibility across their infrastructure
• Security Analytics to provide comprehensive real-time visibility and protect against advanced threats before, during and after an attack

Intrigued? Ready to start "Looking for Trouble" and "Winning the War on Error?"

Check out these executive videos to hear fromSplunk CEO Doug Merritthow we're collaborating to accelerate time-to-insight and see whySplunk Chief Strategy Officer Steven Sorkin'sis excited about Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure. Get the scoop on rock star Splunk Enterprise 6.3 on UCS performance and be inspired by Cisco's 5-minute Strata keynote, "Unleashing the Power of Big Data Today" (psst ... it involves Splunking race car data!).

If you want specifics I highly recommend Splunk's Cisco Security Suite Attack Chain Demo, which offers a quick intro to how organizations use Splunk and Cisco products to before, during and after an attack protect to against advanced threats and malicious insiders. Alternately, below is a quick sampling of blog posts on various integrations:

• Cisco and Splunk: Weapons of a Security Warrior
• More than Just a Pretty Dashboard: Cisco ISE & Splunk turn event analysis into action
• Splunk Integrations with Cisco Security Expand with new AnyConnect NVM App
• Enhancing the Splunk Experience with Cisco UCS
• Find and Fix Problems faster with new Splunk Integration with Cisco UCS
• Splunk and Cisco APIC Drive Network Analytics
• Popular Cisco Networks App Recognized with Splunk Revolution Award
• Real-Time Operational Visibility for Cisco Collaboration Tools with Splunk
• Under the Hood of Cisco IT
• Security Logging in an Enterprise

Finally, to experience Splunk for yourself check out the Splunk for Cisco Security and NX-OS Programmability and Automation on Cisco's hosted dCloud demo environment. Or, better yet, download a free Splunk Enterprise license and one of the more than a dozen free Splunk apps for Cisco.