Yahoo expands Splunk use to gain more Big Data insight from Hadoop

Yahoo is diving deeper into its 600TB of Hadoop data after signing an enterprise license for Splunk's Hunk analytics platform.

The search giant was already a Splunk customer, analysing more than 150TB of data per day using Splunk Enterprise.

It has teams in IT, applications delivery, security and business analytics using Splunk to analyse data from its Hadoop deployment, which stores more than 600TB of operational and business data belonging to the firm.

But the tech firm is now expanding its use of Splunk to different areas of its business, after signing an enterprise license for Hunk that will see teams explore, analyse and visualise Yahoo's Hadoop datasets.

Ian Flint, Yahoo's monitoring architect, said: "Splunk Enterprise and Hunk help us gain insights into all of our data, whether it is streaming in real time or historical data at rest.

"Hunk gives Yahoo deep visibility into our massive Hadoop data stores to help us continuously optimise operational performance."

He claimed Hunk's insights have saved Yahoo millions of dollars annually in hardware provisioning, after being a Splunk customer for several years.

The firm's enterprise license means Yahoo can expand its use of Splunk's Hunk Analytics for Hadoop and NoSQL Data Stores, as well as the Splunk Enterprise platform, which provides data search and visualisation capabilities.

"Splunk Enterprise helps us to maximise revenue by giving product and business teams better insight into our customers, the user experience and any looming issues," Flint said.

The data that teams analyse should give them insights into how customers are using Yahoo services, user experience, click rates, product performance and IT workflow issues.

"It is a great honour for Hunk to play such a critical role in Yahoo's business and its Hadoop deployment," said Shay Mowlem, VP of product marketing at Splunk.

"With hundreds of Splunk users across dozens of teams using Hunk and Splunk Enterprise, Yahoo's enterprise adoption agreement with Splunk is proof of the value Splunk software is delivering to Yahoo.