Splunk announced the general availability of Splunk Enterprise 5, the fastest, most resilient version of the company's flagship product.

The latest release includes added features to create a powerful platform for developers building big data applications.

"Even as data volume and complexity are growing exponentially, the time people are willing to wait for answers is shrinking," said Guido Schroeder, senior vice president of products, Splunk.

"Technology needs to provide answers as quickly as users think of questions, regardless of the speed, complexity and scale of the underlying data. Users need to be able to use their data in ways that help to achieve operational intelligence. We need to put that technology in the hands of developers and IT professionals so they can innovate and drive new ideas. It is for these reasons and more that we created Splunk Enterprise 5."

"With the added pressure on IT professionals to meet performance goals and rapidly introduce new services and control costs, buyers have shifted towards technologies that provide real-time operational visibility and analytics across their mission-critical infrastructures," said Jonah Kowall, research director, IT operations management, Gartner. "These buyers are looking to take advantage of technologies which rely on commodity servers with automatic data redundancy and grid computing models."

Reports are up to 1,000 times faster and dashboards are easier to navigate and share with Splunk Enterprise 5. Dynamic drilldowns integrate simple workflows, providing a more intuitive user experience. Integrated PDFs enable reports or dashboards to be shared with anyone on demand or on a scheduled basis.

Splunk Enterprise 5 introduces patent pending Index Replication that delivers built-in high availability and enterprise-class resilience, while scaling on commodity servers and storage. As data is collected and indexed, multiple identical copies are maintained. During an outage, incoming data continues to get indexed and indexed data continues to be searchable. Set up is simple and management is done through the Splunk Manager user interface.

Splunk Enterprise 5 also contains significant platform features to drive greater extensibility, modularity and interoperability.

For developers, this release includes a robust, versioned API and JavaScript SDK. SDKs are also available for Java, Python and PHP. Each SDK includes comprehensive documentation, resources and tools to help developers accelerate application development and testing. This enables developers to better leverage the Splunk platform by integrating it into their IT infrastructure and to provide a familiar development environment for building big data applications.

Splunk Enterprise 5 also includes features that enable users to capitalize on the full power of Splunk-Hadoop integration. Splunk Hadoop Connect provides bi-directional integration to easily and reliably move data between Splunk Enterprise and Hadoop. This makes it easier to stand up reliable, secure, enterprise-grade big data projects in days instead of months.