On Tuesday, machine data analytics vendor Splunk today announced a 100% uptime SLA for the Splunk Cloud, its cloud-based platform for operational intelligence. The 100% uptime guarantee represents the first SLA in the machine analytics industry that guarantees uptime to a degree that effectively dispels objections about the reliability of cloud infrastructures. Not only does the 100% uptime SLA assuage customer concerns about reimbursement for downtime, but more importantly, it asserts the confidence had by Splunk that the Splunk cloud is engineered to remain fully operational even if one or more of its constituent infrastructure components experiences a disruption. Splunk also announced price reductions of up to 33% that derive from economies of scale and increased efficiencies in addition to revealing more flexible service plans marked by scaling limits from 5 GB/day to 5 TB/day and 10 fold bursting capabilities designed to accommodate especially high spikes in customer workloads. Given that the Splunk Cloud is hosted on AWS, its price reductions come as little surprise given that AWS has cut prices over 40 times, including a significant price cut announced as early as March. That said, Splunk’s 100% uptime guarantee represents an impressive differentiator in a space where vendors have largely shied away from guaranteeing 100% uptime, although one would need to delve deeper into Splunk’s policies for remuneration to understand the real delta between 100% uptime and something fractionally close. Splunk’s expanded scaling options and security features for a virtual private cloud hosted on AWS, marked by no data commingling, in conjunction with slashed prices, continue to consolidate its reputation as the leader in machine data analytics space. Expect Splunk to expand its market traction on the back of its notable 100% uptime guarantee as the enterprise increasingly embraces the necessity of running analytics on machine data dispersed across a variety of infrastructures.
Cloud Computing Today 