Is your filing cabinet is bursting at the seams?Google’s here to help
If you happen to run a massive business that needs to store millions of documents, then the version 5 of Google Search Appliance is the answer. Five times faster than its predecessor and three times the capacity, this bright yellow server remarkably remains the same size as before, and offers a bunch of new features for end users.
Obviously the main challenge for the designers was to jump up from the previous models storage capacity of 3 million documents to ten million without changing the dimensions of the device.
“A typical enterprise search deployment would require dozens of servers if you have a scale of 10 million documents - with multiple back-end databases, Web servers, content servers, and all that stuff,” Google Enterprise Project Manager Nitin Mangtani said.
“We have done some really core architectural changes to simplify the entire search … so the administrators and IT departments just need to manage one server to scale the 10 million documents,” he explained.
To achieve this, both the hardware and software were given a serious overhaul. Google?s engineers tweaked the crawling system to improve speed and installed an improved central processing unit and more memory. Google has essentially built a “brand new hardware and software platform,” Mangtani said
Although the speed and memory were improved, Google?s main focus was to improve the Search Appliance?s ? powered as before by Dell - features that make it easier to use.
One of the major changes is improved search for different types of content, including enterprise systems such as Microsoft Sharepoint, IBM File net, and OpenText LiveLink. Another improved feature is the ability to ad different user groups to define individual search parameters for specific sub-sets.
Other new features include the option for e-mail alerts of specific topics or documents, advanced search analytics, and improved encryption. The Search Appliance also supports Kerberos, as well as UK spelling, as well as international support for Portuguese, Turkish and Vietnamese.
“The idea of the hardware is really simplicity,” Mangtani commented. “You plug and play and you’re up and running.”
Google already says that they have 20,000 Search Application clients includeing Adobe, and NASA.
“[With] any organization or business entity which has a lot of digital content … the main problem for them is they have done some massive investments in content depositories and tools all for the digital content. But all that investment is not fruitful until you can find the right document you are looking for,” Mangtani pointed out.
Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-It, commented on the need for Google?s Search Application: “The effective search is obviously critical in the world of the Internet. There’s really astounding growth in the sheer amount of information and documents that companies are storing and attempting to manage successfully,” he said.
“The more than tripling of capacity on the new appliance … isn’t simply a matter of bigger, better or best. It’s really, I think, a response to a very serious issue that more and more companies are facing - and that’s how to efficiently work with and effectively leverage the information that they continue to collect and store,” he noted.
Google?s Search Appliance doesn?t come cheap though. The entry-level model comes in at a bank breaking US$30,000. But if you have a need for a lot more capacity, Google can custom build you one that will handle up to 30 million documents ? but if you have to ask the price?you cant afford it.
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