Splunk, best known for its eponymous on-premise and cloud-based analytics offering, has launched a beta program for a new product that delivers a similar set of query, reporting, dashboard and visualisation tools for Hadoop clusters.
Splunk's flagship analytics product is typically used to process machine-generated data such as logs. The new Hunk tool, currently in beta, is intended to offer a similar experience for users of Hadoop, a framework for distributed processing of datasets.
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Splunk released Hadoop Connect in October last year, which offered bidirectional integration with Hadoop. "We have seen more than 1000 downloads as of June but our customers also want to be able to leverage the full capabilities of Spunk natively on Hadoop," said Andy Ho, Splunk's product marketing manager for APAC.
Ho said that, in particular, the data in many enterprise's Hadoop clusters is TBTM – 'too big to move'.
The company is in the process of certifying Hunk for a number of leading Hadoop distros, including distributions from Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR Technologies. These relationships may be deeper than just certification, Ho said.
Analyst firm Gartner has projected shot-term spending of 20 times more on IT services than software for big data, Ho said. Hunk is intended to make getting information out of Hadoop easier for non-specialised users. Splunk itself mainly targets IT directors and operations staff, but Hunk is designed for data scientists and data architects.
A final pricing model for the new offering is yet to be established, with Spunk "still debating" how to charge for Hunk. However, it will most likely be an annual licence based on the number of nodes in a Hadoop cluster.
Currently the beta program involves more than 20 Splunk customers. None of the beta testers are Australia-based organisations, but Splunk is actively recruiting new enterprises to join the program.
Hunk should hit general availability "within this year", Ho said.
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