Microsoft Fast ESP Architecture
September 4, 2009
Short honk: I was riffling through the Overflight inputs and I came across “EMC ‘Stitching’ Its Stack With Kazeon”. Kazeon is a vendor of eDiscovery systems. What interested me was this statement, attributed to an unnamed software engineer at EMC, so take the comment with a dash hoi sin sauce:
EMC sees e-discovery as a strategic tool allowing it to sharply differentiate itself from Microsoft. (Microsoft acquired erstwhile EMC search partner FAST Search and Transfer in early 2008. A software engineer at EMC told me that FAST has a “fundamentally flawed architecture. Microsoft is welcome to have it.”) Use our stack, EMC is saying, and we will provide you with tools allowing you to find and manage all the information in your organization, not just for litigation purposes, but to help stimulate innovation.
What struck me was the statement “fundamentally flawed architecture.” Harsh words. Could Microsoft have spent $1.2 billion on a company with “fundamentally flawed architecture”? I don’t know the answer, but I put the statement in my “Quotes” folder. When the “new” Fast ESP becomes available, more information will be available. Perhaps some of this information will prove or disprove this statement from Bnet.com’s story.
Stephen Arnold, September 3, 2009
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2 Responses to “Microsoft Fast ESP Architecture”
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I think they are right that current FAST ESP is based on an old architecture which is not really designed to utilize today’s powerful servers fully, nor does it provide real-time indexing, and the HW footprint is huge. But I believe MS mainly paid for the heads, which are truly excellent.
Besides, for the kind of customers FAST normally attracts, the “flawed” architecture is acceptable because the platform delivers on scalability, stability and fault tolerance, which at the end of the day is more important than just a sexy architecture.
The fact that EMC is abandoning FAST is not really new news. Back in early June, EMC was publicly discussing using Lucene as the basis of their search efforts going forward for the Documentum platform:
Slides 12 & 13 of the following presentation show this:
http://www.textanalyticsnews.com/usa/presentations/LouJordano.pdf