While enterprises need to ensure they have the technology to manage the increasing amount of content created by the information worker, so must the technology vendor ensure its platform can support that growth.
Québec City-based enterprise search technology Coveo Solutions Inc. recently conducted a test of its document index and search platform. Chief technology officer, Mark Sanfaçon, said the company wanted to focus on platform scalability in light of immense data growth across businesses. “Coveo sees scalability as the major factor for any company doing search solutions,” he said. The company also used the test to optimize the current platform.
According to Sanfaçon, the test of the enterprise search platform – which underlies the company’s G2BT Information Access Suite – proved capable of indexing millions of documents per hour, hundreds of millions within several days, and upwards of a billion across a few weeks.
An organization of approximately 6,000 employees may be faced with managing “a couple of millions” of documents on a daily basis, he said. However, he noted that such an estimate would differ depending on the proportion of modified documents, say on the company Intranet, versus newly-created ones.
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Enterprises are increasingly more interested in technology that will allow them to manage this data load, said Sanfaçon because “a lot of companies realize now they have a lot of information and they need to find these documents for compliance to search throughout their documents to answer litigation.”
But besides regulatory compliance and possible e-discovery, normal business operations require quick identification and retrieval from the mailbox or intranet, he said.
The test of Coveo’s search platform was run on hardware from Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard Co., specifically, HP BladeSystem server blades with AMD OpteronT processors, coupled with HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array.
Michael Kendall, worldwide manager of ESS solution builder program with Hewlett-Packard, said that running Coveo’s test on the company’s hardware aligned with the solution builder program’s goal to apply the capabilities of the bladesystem – cost and power effectiveness, and scalability – to a plethora of applications that customers might require.
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And, he said, unstructured data like e-mails, PDFs and Word documents are just some of the things that workers would want to be able to search for across the organization. “Obviously the need to keep track of all that stuff is growing quickly.”
To make that possible, he said, the platform should be a combination of software that can split tasks so they perform in a parallel manner across a scalable architecture, and of hardware that is scalable and expandable in a building-block style.
“We are seeing growing opportunity in this particular market space for this kind of software operating in this kind of environment,” said Kendall, adding that there’s been an overall growth of high-performance computing outside of the research and academic sphere, like for business intelligence and engineering purposes.
Just last May, Hewlett-Packard launched a two-in-one server blade for businesses running on scale-out environments to help them reap better performance while cutting floor space and power usage.