Every time I talk with Tony Vincent about use cases and possibilities with Splunk Edge Hub, I’m blown away by the creativity. The demo at #CiscoLive was no different. Tony walked us through how Edge Hub is being used with Power over Ethernet and how to get insight with Splunk dashboards via the Edge Hub data. Entire booths in the showcase were powered by this solution, and Splunk provided stunning visibility into the utilization.

Transcript

Auto-generated captions, lightly cleaned. Speakers are not separately labeled.

Hey everybody, we’re out here at Cisco Live and I ran into Tony here and we talk about Edgehub a lot, you and I. And we got a brand new use case, just so many use cases for Edgehub and we’re talking about it with power. >> Yeah. >> Can you give me some more information about what we’re doing here? >> Yeah. So, what’s really cool about this whole booth is that everything is powered off the network. So whether it’s the lights or the cameras or even the sitstand desk that we’ll walk past later, they’re all powered as PoE. Even the big displays and the PC associated with them are all powered directly off the network on PoE. Now that’s interesting all by itself. And that’s powered by a catalyst switch over here. And we’re pulling data with EdgeHub putting that in. and we’ll take a look at some of those dashboards. But we’re also pulling data off this panduit which converts fault regular AC power to fault managed power. So this allows us to distribute DC power, convert it once, only have the heat loss, power loss and the heat uh components lost once um throughout the space and then all of that cable can be run by practically talented but not necessarily licensed electricians. That’s a huge win as we’re seeing demands against uh electricians in the trade, whether it’s data centers or the fact that almost 100,000 more people are retiring out of the trade than are coming in as journeymen into the trade. >> Can you give us a little bit more detail? Show us what this is. >> Sure. So, let’s start here at the panduit switch. This is a standard NEMA rack. Ignore all the marketing stuff that makes it hard to tell that. But coming in the back is AC, regular house AC. This is converting it into packetized, touchsafe, fires safe DC power. We can distribute that. If we take a look over here off cables that are class 4 electric cables. So these are 16 or 18 gauge cables. They can run a,00 watts per pair. Why do we care? Right? because this can cohabitate in the same raceway that you use for data and fiber throughout the rest of your network, right? All of your space can now cohabitate as a single thing. Now, all of that’s interesting, but what’s really cool, of course, is that just as you would expect, we’re using this edgehub over here to pull SNMP data off of this and display it in concert with the PoE switch. Now, I want to take you around to take a look at the PoE switch because I think it’s interesting in and of itself. We have another edge hub here pulling data in off this catalyst switch. So, this is providing PoE out to everything that’s out there. The sitst stand desk, the lights, the cameras, everything out in the booth is being powered off this device. And what’s interesting to me is that because we’re bringing DC power in and we’re distributing DC power out and everything in the device is DC. This is like completely cool to the touch. There’s no warmth at all that you would expect. So we’re not losing all that power to heat and therefore paying for things that aren’t generating useful data. Okay. So all of that’s interesting, but let’s take a look at how that lights up inside of Splunk, right? All of that data allows us to take a look both at say the panduit in very deep detail and by the way, like so this is a nice dashboard, right? A standard run-of-the-mill dashboard that we know and love from Splunk. Obviously, you can tell from up here this is dashboard studio, but nonetheless straightforward dashboard. This is giving us information about room comfort, number of people in the space, and so forth. But if we take spend a little more time, here’s data off of those two devices that is giving us a standard Sanki diagram with capacity and utilization for each step as we’re moving through the space. Now, why do you care? come back over here and look at the PoE devices and how many of them are running really close to capacity. So, this allows us to do some planning to say, hey, maybe this guy is uh provisioned at 30 watts and maybe it ought to be PoE++ at 90. So, we get information off this that provides actionable value ad to somebody that would be looking at this dashboard. Now, if we again go back to the panduit in deep detail because we’re powering things all the way across the show floor off this same device. This gives us insights into all of those lines and wires. Now, I want to before we wrap, I want to bring one last point up and that is if we take a look at this dashboard. Now, in fairness, this is a video of a dashboard because as I say, trade shows. Um, but nonetheless, this is a legit real Splunk dashboard that is pulling information in about power utilization, heat distribution, all throughout a simple small data center environment. So, imagine expanding this to the next step both in a data center, in a wiring closet, in a individual uh location, anywhere inside your office space. And it really drives to one of those three big components that we talk about at Cisco with the futurep proof workplace and the AI ready data center. All of those things come in for us to be able to get real value out of the data that exists on your network and bringing that into Splunk where we can combine it with other things and get extra value. >> Man, Tony, every time we talk about Edgehub, I’m just so blown away about all the things that it can do. Brand new use cases. If I want to go learn more about what’s possible, where should I go? >> So, I think the first step is to always go to EdgeHub Central. Edgehub Central’s got a list of of detailed partners that focus in this OT space because you really want somebody who understands both Splunk but also the OT realm. It also has a list of use cases and examples in those use cases. And so, I think that’s probably the best starting point for most people. Edgehub central.com. >> Fantastic. Thanks so much, Tony. Appreciate it.