San Francisco – June 26, 2006 – Splunk (www.splunk.com) today announced that the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) is using Splunk, the industry's first search software for fast moving IT data, to help in its mission to manage systems that support thousands of open source developers worldwide. With Splunk's advanced log file search capabilities saving many man-hours, the lab has been able to maintain staffing levels while still tripling in size.
OSUOSL was developed to accelerate the adoption of open source software across the globe and aid the community that develops and uses it. The lab provides hosting for the most high profile open source projects in the world, including the Linux Kernel Project, the Apache Software Foundation, Debian Linux, Gentoo Linux, OpenOffice.org, KDE, Mozilla and Drupal. With the rapid increase in open source adoption, the lab has tripled in size over the last year and requires advanced monitoring and management tools to support the 130 servers hosting projects. Seventy of these servers are fully managed by the OSL staff, which is mostly made up of revolving OSU student interns.
Corey Shields, Infrastructure Manager at OSUOSL, is in charge of computing infrastructure for the lab. Splunk is helping Shields deal with the constantly changing infrastructure and loss of institutional knowledge as different interns come and go. Splunk's ability to deal with any kind of data from any application or device means that OSUOSL can monitor and manage the steady stream of projects that arrive for hosting. Splunk's ability to save searches, Saved Splunks, and Splunk's online wiki of IT event information, Splunk Base, allow Shields’ team to save knowledge for future staff that would otherwise be lost as an intern leaves.
"If you're a systems administrator, you need to check out Splunk. That's all there is to it," Shields said. While using Splunk to proactively look across his infrastructure, Shields noticed a cron job set up by a developer who had left six months earlier that was running every minute. "Splunk showed its worth almost immediately by helping to find problems I didn’t even notice the symptoms of."
OSL often receives troubleshooting issues for email both internally and for the projects they host. With Splunk spanning across multiple hosts, Shields and his team can simply start splunking for a user’s email address to find out where an email ended up or if it was ever sent out at all.
Shields added, "Grep and awk give you a ‘fire and hope you aimed right’ interface to find what you’re looking for. Splunk’s interface gives you a way to ‘aim that bullet’ once it leaves the chamber."
More than 42,000 system administrators, developers and support engineers have downloaded Splunk since its launch in late last year. Fortune 500 companies, developers and consultants in the United States, as well as globally across Europe, Australia, India, and South Africa are splunking their systems to troubleshoot problems faster, improve availability and reduce the cost of managing IT infrastructure. The demand for quickly searching and navigating through complex mountains of production IT data is turning Splunk into a global experience.
OSUOSL and Splunk have worked in cooperation to develop a Splunker's Guide case study, for more information please visit www.splunk.com/r/OSL.
About OSU Open Source Lab
The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is a global, world-class facility and data center for Open Source Software (OSS) knowledge, hosting, infrastructure, development, and collaboration. The Open Source Lab fosters the development of unique OSS products, as well as directly assists in the development, implementation, and use of targeted OSS solutions for use in education, research, government, and business. By working closely with the OSU community, other universities, governments, and private sector business, the OSU Open Source Lab is quickly becoming a critical worldwide center for services related to Open Source software.
About Splunk
Splunk is a radical new approach to troubleshooting IT systems and improving availability. We're making the world's IT data accessible, understandable and useful. The idea was born of our own frustration building and running some of the world's largest computing environments at places like Apple, HP, Infoseek, Microsoft, SourceForge.net, Sun and Yahoo. Based in San Francisco, Splunk is a private company funded by August Capital, JK&B Capital and Sevin Rosen Funds. Contact:
Christine Fife
Splunk Inc.
415.568.4208
christine@splunk.com
Christopher Fucanan
Atomic PR
415-439-4219
chris.fucanan@atomicpr.com
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