Maxxcat: Search Appliance Challenger
January 30, 2009
Maxxcat Corp., has released an enterprise search appliance to compete with Google’s. The Maxxcat XB-250 was designed with simplicity and speed in mind, and it offers all sorts of bells and whistles such as clustering and mirroring, customizable rankings, scripts and real time edits, field-based indexing, and remote support for diagnostics. They’ve posted a fact sheet at http://www.maxxcat.com/datasheet_final.pdf comparing the XB-250 and the GSA Mini (info available at http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/), and the more complex MaxxCat EX-5000 versus the Google™ GB-1001. For more specific details, check out http://maxxcat.com/compare.html. Maxxcat says its appliance is 16 times faster, takes three minutes to install, and is only a quarter of the cost for its basic model. You can also take the two systems for a head-to-head performance test at http://maxxcat.com/head2head.html. Added to our watch list. More later.
Jessica W. Bratcher, January 30, 2009
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Is that Lucene under the hood? Xapian? Something else?
The search engine under the hood has been created by MaxxCat from the ground up. It runs on a special Linux platform, and has been built with one thing in mind: speed. It uses an extremely fast crypto muxing algorithm to process queries, and without giving away too many secrets, if we can take 1 microsecond out of execution time, we do it, even if it means lots of extra work on our end. On a 1 million document collection, the kernel can dispatch and resolve a multi-term query spanning the entire collection in as little as 100 usec. The clustering capability allows collections to grow both in size and number of QPMS by simply adding additional nodes. Our XB-250 is the entry point and is extremely fast at a low price point, but we can build very large configurations with n-node clusters.