According to scientists, the age of smartphones has left humans with such a short attention span that even a goldfish can hold a thought for longer. On an average, human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in year 2000 to 8 seconds in today's smart-world.

What does this mean for Splunk Enterprise ?The sprawling data pipelines of machine generated data has the potential to become a company's most profitable resource, both in terms of operational efficiencies as well as providing new business insights. As organizations are looking at Splunk to decipher the analytics from machine-generated data, it becomes critical to ensure that the response time not only for dense searches but also for sparse searches meets user expectations. The sparse searches are equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack. However, the user has no inkling that they are looking at a denseora sparse search. Further, as the data size increases or number of users increases, it becomes imperative to add an additional Splunk search head or indexer on-demand to ensure consistent response times. In a hyper-competitive market, IT teams require an infrastructure than can be deployed rapidly, scaled instantaneouslyandmanaged with minimal human intervention.

Recognizing these challenges, Cisco and Splunk jointly introduced a set of reference architectures with Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data, that delivers exceptional performance and massive scalability. With this design, sparse searches get a big performance boost, ensuring consistent response times for both sparse and dense searches. At the same time, UCS service profiles with automated policy driven mechanism makes it extremely simple, to add and configure new nodes on-demand. Check out the blog from Cisco's Distinguished Engineer Raghu Nambiar for details on the reference configurations forhigh performance or high data retentionavailable insingle instance and scale-out cluster deployments.

With Splunk Enterprise 6.3 and the continued engineering collaboration between both teams, led to significant  performance improvements with Splunk running on UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data. We are excited to see the Cisco UCS platform deliver an improved performance with Splunk Enterprise 6.3.

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Enhance your @Splunk experience with#CiscoUCS at#SplunkConf.#bigdata http://bit.ly/1YzYdQA

A post shared by Cisco Data Center (@ciscodc) on Sep 25, 2015 at 8:15am PDT

Today,#splunkconf keynote featured Jim McHugh, VP, Datacenter and UCS Marketing at Cisco, who highlighted 4x faster indexing and 6x faster search  performance with Spunk 6.3 running on UCS.

Come and visit us at the Cisco booth at Splunk .conf 2015 in Vegas from Sep 21-24th to learn more. We have a stellar team at#splunkconf.

If you are coming to Strata Hadoop, NY Sept 28th -Oct 1st, you don't want to miss  Cisco at Strata.

And, for those of you who want to jump in right away, see Wissam Ali's (Splunk Solution Architect) blog on how Cisco CSIRT uses Splunk to monitor, identify and respond to the latest security threats.