Splunk introduces Hunk 6.1

“Hunk brings simplicity to the complex world of analyzing massive volumes of data stored in Hadoop and NoSQL,” said Sanjay Mehta, vice president of product marketing, Splunk. “Hunk is ideal for organisations seeking a faster, easier way to unlock the value from huge amounts of historical data at rest. Alternate approaches require specialized skillsets, fixed schemas, complex programming or moving the data – all of which add up to wasted time and lost opportunity. We are excited to see what NoSQL developers can do now that we have extended Hunk’s capability from Hadoop to NoSQL data stores.”

“While adoption of Hadoop and other Big Data stores continues to grow, our research indicates that the analytics outcomes from these projects are limited. With a focus on faster analytics and quick time to value, Hunk aims to change this,” said Tony Cosentino, vice president and research director, Ventana Research. “By now enabling analytics capabilities to NoSQL developers, in addition to Hadoop developers, Splunk opens up additional opportunities for Big Data analytics.”

Full-featured Analytics Platform for Hadoop and NoSQL
Hunk 6.1 contains significant new and updated product features to help organisations unlock the business value of data in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores:
· Splunk Virtual Index: Patent-pending technology that decouples the storage tier from the data access and analytics tiers enabling Hunk to route requests to different data stores.
· Report Acceleration: Transparently cache search results in Hadoop, improving reporting response times and performance without moving data. Drives more efficient utilization of Hadoop resources – as the amount of data grows and the number of queries increases.
· Interactive Dashboards and Charts: Rapidly build custom dashboards with a new dashboard editor and deliver an enhanced analytics experience with charting overlay, pan-and-zoom controls and in-dashboard drill downs.
· Embedded Analytics: Embeds Hunk charts and dashboards into common third-party business applications.
· Streaming Resource Libraries – Enables developers to stream data from NoSQL and other data stores, such as Apache Accumulo, Apache Cassandra, MongoDB and Neo4j, for exploration, analysis and visualization in Hunk.
· Support for Multiple File Formats: Automates access to text files, sequence files, Record Columnar Files (RCFile), Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) files and Parquet columnar files.
· Pass-through Authentication: Enables submission of MapReduce jobs and secure access to Hadoop clusters using the authenticated credentials and roles assigned by IT.

Hunk includes a powerful environment for developers to build big data applications using the languages and frameworks they already use and are familiar with. Hunk includes a standards-based web framework, documented REST API, Eclipse plug-in and software development kits for C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP and Ruby.

Organisations from Around the World and Leading NoSQL Vendors Discuss Hunk
Hunk 6.1 was beta tested by Splunk customers and several leading NoSQL vendors. Key features included report acceleration, interactive dashboards and charts, and pass-through authentication.

“Hunk has been an essential point-of-entry to the Hadoop space for Belvedere Trading. It allows for interactive exploration and validation of our data in a way that handwritten MapReduce tasks never could, especially for those individuals who have stronger quantitative backgrounds than fingers-on-keyboard programming experience,” said Michael Saia, infrastructure team lead, Belvedere Trading, a leading proprietary trading firm that specializes in equity index and commodity derivatives. "Furthermore, the integration that Hunk provides between our data located in Hadoop and the real-time machine data we already gather with Splunk Enterprise will enable us to dramatically facilitate the drawing of correlations between them.”

“Effective media delivery and traffic management for service and content providers involves a complex balance of network resources, end user experience and monetization opportunities. Through its simple but powerful user interface, Hunk enabled Vantrix to quickly explore, analyseand visualize terabytes of mobile network usage data, enabling us to provide our customers with rich insights into network traffic, consumer usage behavior and their Quality of Experience,” said Mark Hopper, vice president of product management, Vantrix, a global provider of media delivery solutions to service and content providers. “We chose Hunk because it runs natively on our virtualized Hadoop platform, easily adapts to our traffic logs, and gives us both a flexible and performant self-service model to uncover insights to help improve our customers’ businesses. As we roll it out to more users within the role-based security controls, we are excited to use the new report acceleration features which will deliver search results faster than ever before.”

“The marriage of Hunk and MongoDB enables our joint customers to understand and analysetheir data faster than ever,” said Matt Asay, vice president of business development and marketing, MongoDB. “Helping organisations to search and visualize in Hunk from JSON documents stored in MongoDB, with indexing on any attribute, is a powerful new out-of-the-box capability. Hunk can also help to tighten integration for the many joint customers who use both Hadoop for complex data aggregation and MongoDB for document storage by putting data from both environments on one set of dashboards.”

“Joint customers tell us they want to use Hunk with Neo4j for telco operational analytics, fraud detection and Internet of Things. Hunk will soon allow users to bring together their connected data in the Neo4j graph database, and view it alongside their log data in Hadoop, all from a single Hunk interface,” said Emil Eifrem, CEO, Neo Technology. “End users will reap the benefits of improved operational intelligence by combining Hunk’s robust analytics with the power of the graph with Neo4j.”
“Integration between Sqrrl Enterprise and Hunk opens the door for our joint customers in the U.S. Department of Defense, intelligence community and private sector to benefit from rapid schema-less search, analytics and visualizations of tens of petabytes of data or more,” said Mark Terenzoni, CEO, Sqrrl. “With the integration of Hunk’s role-based security, Sqrrl's data-centric security and the power of Apache Accumulo’s cell-level security, our joint customers can securely unlock the previously untapped potential of big data.”