Hunk Lets Splunk Users Analyse Data In Hadoop

Splunk, the company behind the eponymous machine-generated data analytics platform, has released Hunk, a tool that enables any Splunk user to directly explore, analyse and visualise data stored in Hadoop clusters.

With Hunk, the company says it has created a user-friendly way to tackle Big Data, without the need for an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process, and the new product is available immediately, along with a free 60-day trial with no limits on data size or number of Hadoop nodes.

Killer app

Splunk says that the new functionality makes Big Data analytics more accessible as it allows for the derivation of  insights from raw, unstructured and polystructured data in Hadoop, without the need for specialised programming skills, fixed schemas or costly integrations.

“Hadoop is an increasingly important technology and many organizations are storing vast amounts of data in Hadoop,” explains Sanjay Mehta, vice president of product marketing at Splunk. “However, this often creates a problem because the data sets become too big to move and more traditional approaches to analytics of raw data in Hadoop require brittle, fixed schemas,”

“These are key reasons our customers consistently tell us about the cost, time and sheer difficulty of getting analytics out of their Hadoop clusters. With Hunk, we applied everything Splunk has learned from ten years of analytics experience with more than 6,000 customers to this unique challenge.”

Hunk was released to over 100 Beta-testers in June, with participants highlighting simple installation and reporting shorter development cycles. It works on Apache Hadoop and its various distributions, including those from Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, MapR and Pivotal. It is built on Splunk Virtual Index technology, and allows the use of Data Models and the Pivot Interface, first released in Splunk Enterprise 6 earlier this month.

For developers, the tool includes integrated web framework and software development kits (SDK) for C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP and Ruby, and as for its mobile capabilities, Hunk users can combine multiple charts, views and reports into role-specific dashboards which can be viewed and edited on virtually any device.

Pricing for a one-year term license of Hunk starts at $2,500 per Hadoop node, with a minimum of ten nodes.

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Originally published on eWeek.