Google Ramps Speed in Enterprise Search 6.0

Google today introduced the Google Search Appliance 6.0 (GSA), the latest in its search appliance for datacenters that focuses on greater scalability, security, and delivers better search results.

Cyrus Mistry, Google enterprise search product manager, told InternetNews.com that the top feature is scalability. All of the devices have been given a significant performance boost. The 2U GB-7007 can handle 10 million documents and the new 5U GB-9009 can handle 30 million documents.

Scalability, said Mistry, is as easy as plugging in an Ethernet port. "You tell the master box, 'here is a secondary node,' and the master will figure out what to send it," he said.

You could search a billion documents in five racks of boxes, the company said in a YouTube-like video accompanying the announcement.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) said that it has the necessary scaling technology already in use to power its google.com Web site. In order to deliver the scalability, it needs to take apart indexes, split up the work, and then recombine them, all of which is now possible in GSA 6.0.

Mistry said that the technology is superior to the competition as other enterprise search vendors rely on an infrastructure of database servers and storage arrays that makes scaling complex.

Google's announcement comes as a report from IDC, "As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands," said that the volume of digital data will grow by almost five times over the next four years while IT budgets grow only 20 percent and staff increase only 10 percent. In response, IT organizations will need to develop and enforce data management policies, align business and IT organizations, and get IT staff involved in business.

The GSA plugs into Sharepoint Portal and can be used to deliver Sharepoint search results.

Each box can scan 100,000 documents per hour, and prioritizes the most active folders on the enterprise network, Mistry said, checking each folder twice as often as it's usually updated, so a folder that's usually updated once each month would be checked twice per month and one updated daily would be scanned twice per day.

Pricing starts at $30,000 for 500,000 documents. Customers can add to the number of documents their GSA handles by purchasing license keys.