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Splunk unveils new Hunk at CeBIT, Sydney

Hunk 6.1 turns raw data in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores into business insights

Big Data software specialist Splunk has extended the power of Hunk beyond Hadoop through streaming resource libraries for NoSQL and other data stores.

Hunk 6.1, released at Sydney's largest tech conference, Cebit, make it faster and easier to turn raw, unstructured data in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores into business insights.

It enables improved reporting times, while interactive dashboards deliver self-service analytics without fixed schemas or the need to move data.

It also allows the use of data stores such as Apache Accumulo, Apache Cassandra, MongoDB and Neo4j.

Splunk vice president of product marketing, Sanjay Mehta, said it brought simplicity to the complex world of analysing massive volumes of data stored in Hadoop and NoSQL.

“Hunk is ideal for organisations seeking a faster, easier way to unlock the value from huge amounts of historical data at rest," he said.

"Alternate approaches require specialised skillsets, fixed schemas, complex programming or moving the data – all of which add up to wasted time and lost opportunity.

Ventana Research, vice president, Tony Cosentino, said while adoption of Hadoop and other Big Data stores continued to grow, company research indicated the analytics outcomes from these projects were limited.

"With a focus on faster analytics and quick time to value, Hunk aims to change this,” he said.

“By now enabling analytics capabilities to NoSQL developers, in addition to Hadoop developers, Splunk opens up additional opportunities for Big Data analytics.”

According to a company statement, Hunk includes a powerful environment for developers to build big data applications using the languages and frameworks they already use and are familiar with.

It includes a standards-based web framework, documented REST API, Eclipse plug-in and software development kits for C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP and Ruby.

It was beta tested by Splunk customers and several leading NoSQL vendors and its key features include report acceleration, interactive dashboards and charts, and pass-through authentication.

Belvedere trading, infrastructure team lead, Michael Saia, said Hunk had been an essential point-of-entry to the Hadoop space for his company.

"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,” he said.

"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.”