Splunk Enterprise provides high reliability in terms of data duplication and redundant search capability by offering the ability to specify a replication factor and search factor in configuration settings for clustered environments. Search Factor and Replication Factor are terms associated with Clustering techniques i.e., Search head clustering & Indexer clustering.   Search Factor: It is only associated with indexer clustering. The search factor determines the number of searchable copies of data the indexing cluster maintains. The default value for a search factor is 2, meaning that the cluster maintains two searchable copies of all the data buckets.   Replication Factor: It specifies the number of raw data copies of indexed data we want to maintain across the indexing cluster. Indexers store incoming data in buckets, and the cluster will maintain copies of each bucket distributed across the nodes in the indexing tier (as many copies as you specify for the replication factor) so that if one or more individual indexers go down, the data still resides elsewhere in the cluster.  This provides both the ability to search all the data in the presence of one or more missing nodes and to redistribute copies of the data to other nodes and so maintain the specified number of duplicate copies.  The indexing cluster can tolerate a failure of (replication factor -1) indexers (or peer nodes, in Splunk nomenclature). If we are using a replication factor (RF) of two, the cluster maintains two copies of the data, so we can lose one peer node and not lose the data altogether; if you use an RF of three, we can lose up to two nodes and still maintain at least one copy; and so on  Therefore, for the replication factor, the default value is 3.  In summary, the replication factor simply represents the number of copies of the raw data maintained across the indexing tier, and the search factor represents the number of copies of the index files used for searching that data is maintained. Also, the search factor must be less than or equal to the replication factor.