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Microsoft Phasing Out FAST Search For Linux, Unix
viralMeme writes "Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for its FAST enterprise search products, as of its next release. According to a Thursday blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjørn Olstad, 'We’ve continued to sell, support, and update the Linux and UNIX versions of FAST ESP, and we’ve designed the next wave of FAST products (scheduled for release in the first half of calendar year 2010) to include a cross-platform search core that has been extended to take advantage of web services and support mixed-platform deployment models. With our 2010 products scheduled for release in a few months, we’ve just started to plan for our next wave of products. As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX. Many of our customers run FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX today, and we recognize that our future focus on Windows means change. To ease the transition, we’re investing in interoperability between Windows and other operating systems, reaffirming our commitment to 10 years of support for our non-Windows products, and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future.'"
It's a clear sign that MS still has a (probably growing) fear of *nix, especially Linux.
It's also an opportunity for some enterprising company or group to fill the void. All it will do is cost MS some sales. I doubt many organizations will migrate to Windows Server just for FAST.
The more they tighten their grip, the more the world will slip through their fingers.
"...As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX...."
Translation:
"We are canning Linux and UNIX support to solidify Microsoft lock-in."
Innovation is a unit of measurement now? Is that imperial or metric innovations?
Your lack of faith is disturbing.
.... gorrrgling sound of Justniz grabbing to this throat.....
"...and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future."
Reads:
"We'll try to force everyone to use Windows in the future."
Well...who expected something different anyway?
Linux is getting better and better, with more features added, and I'm not a pawn in corporate revenue/greed/forced upgrade strategy.
Thanks Linux.
F.U. Microsoft.
All hail the IT monoculture! Praise and glory to the brand!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Oh no!! How will the Linux and Unix communities cope?!?
Who gives a shit?!?!
Lucene has the same abilities as FAST and is a lot more efficient , its used by most of the ediscovery vendors and its free in it base format yes you will have to do some work on the interface and other support areas but its the solution to MS ditching Linux support for search
men will do for beer
FAST died on the vine a long time ago. It was a dot-com that just missed the tail of the dot-com mania. So they sold their hype to Microsoft and then disappeared off the face of the planet until this week. Track down the marketeers that stired up the FAST mud again.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Both kinds.
Country AND Western.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
we've designed the next wave of FAST products (scheduled for release in the first half of calendar year 2010) to include a cross-platform search core
but immediately after that he says:
in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX
It sounds to me like one of two things happened. Either they decided to stop designing their product, or management decided that they didn't like *nix. And to think, you'd be hard pressed to find a mainstream open source app not ported to three or more platforms. Proprietary software is silly. :(
Microsoft makes a search product? Really?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Seems to me that if they are going to drop the FAST searching they should continue to support the SLOW search that we all know and love.
The total *revenue* last year in enterprise search is just 1.1 billion dollars, according to Gartner, according to the article. It is going to touch 2 billion may be in 2013, again according the article. Considering that Microsoft gets 6.5 billion dollars *profit* per quarter, this is chump change. Further, Google is synonymous with search. It sells the Google Server in a Box, that does mail, calender, shared docs all behind the firewall of the client, unreachable by either the pings from the internet, or by subpoena. If this market segment grows, it is going to be growing the way Google wants it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Never heard of it before.
That was fast..
A moose once bit his sister.
It isn't an acronym, it is a product name.
FAST Search. Microsoft bought them last year. Microsoft tried to get their Enterprise Search to work and failed multiple times and finally gave up and bought FAST since FAST kept taking their business.
Yes.
Indeed: "Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for something nobody has heard of or cares about....."
That innovation per cycle might mean fix and add more vulnerabilities per cycle. Can't have the Unix/Linux version showing up the Microsoft version without more vulnerabilities to fix and so few added..
Hi I'm Steve. I work for Microsoft and I'm going to ask you to keep buying Microsoft products. There's not much new here, we've decided make this software run only on Microsoft products so that should help you decide. If you don't use FAST, this probably won't affect you but we're looking for more ways to get you to use only Microsoft. Thanks!
Ahh, thank you. I thought it actually stood for something, but it was just a goofy product name with caps lock stuck in the awesome position.
it's not chump change.
I make a little over $10,000 quarterly.
For $1700 I will dance a jig.
Hell, for $1700 I might even try windows.
-- Sig under construction...
Actually the full name of the company is Fast Search And Transfer (FAST).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Search_%26_Transfer
They just dropped support for the original XBox live too. Are they looking for ways to tick off customers or what?
In a surprise move, Microsoft announced today that more innovation actually means less compatibility. More on this at 11. In other news, the South Pole will now be referred to as the North Pole and East will become West. No word from Santa yet on how this will affect next year's operations.
Embrace, extend, and what, exactly? Oh yeah - EXTINGUISH FAST!! Tell me it isn't so - wasn't Microsoft turning over a new leaf, or something? Phhht.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Actually I believe (well this is what I told when we worked with them just after the MS acquisition) that it's a "backronym" based on the name of the company who originally developed the platform, Fast Search & Transfer ASA (I know it doesn't make sense, even as a backronym which tend to make little sense to start with, but they're Norwegian so maybe it's a lost in translation thing).
You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought!
Bow-ties are cool.
Just to add to this, the reason we were told this is because our reaction was pretty much the same as yours, i.e. does this stand for something or did they really just call their search platform the equivalent of SUPER-AWESOME-SEARCH!!!! ;)
amazing how nobody saw that one coming...
Seriously, folks, is this really news? I'd imagine that when Microsoft does a takeover these days, one of the criteria they're using is "are we going to have a repeat of the Hotmail clusterfuck?" They were planning on doing this before they bought the company, and the only question was when and what excuse they'd be using...
c.
Log in or piss off.
BTW: What does FAST do, anyway?
Well, see, while the Valkyries were developed to work in both atmospheric and space flight, the intakes (which act as hydrogen scoops for the fusion reactors in the engines) aren't able to get sufficient fuel out in space, so the fighter's operational range is quite limited. The FAST packs address this problem by providing a large reserve of fuel for the fighter, as well as a bit of extra armor and missiles to increase the fighter's offensive power... But with the added bulk of the FAST packs the Valkyrie ceases to be effective in atmospheric combat, so they must be ejected prior to atmospheric flight.
All the hype about 2012 is wrong. The Zentradi bombardment will be happening later this year...
Bow-ties are cool.
Would it kill you to spell out the damn acronym at least once in the article summary?
Fuel and Sensor Tactical
Bow-ties are cool.
Microsoft not wanting to support a competitor to its core product, particularly a competitor that is kicking their ass in the server market...how surprising.
This is exactly why nobody should ever get sucked into Microsoft 'interoperability' ploys. They are not about interoperability. They are always about extending the MS monopoly into areas that they could not reach without paying lip service to interoperability.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
It's the basic tenet of all my software development direction. I find it ridiculously easy, but the average software developer doesn't program at my chosen level of abstraction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XtUML
We've seen this coming for a long time. Ever since MS bought fast. We use an OEM packaged FAST with our Documentum content server. EMC is planning to move away from FAST to Lucene in the next version. Honestly, I say good riddance to FAST. FAST has been nothing but a headache but FAST on Windows, now that is a nightmare.
First they eliminate FAST search, but it will soon be replaced by Microsoft's patented SLOW search technology, and the world will again belong to M$!!
and GNU/Linux is a Operating System. :-)
This is a bit off topic, but you just gave us a great example of what is so terribly wrong with a number of Wikipedia articles. You were referring to some thing called XtUML, and helpfully provided the wikipedia link. Unfortunately, after reading the 1st paragraph, I still don't have the faintest idea of what it is. Here are the 2 first sentences:
Executable UML, often abbreviated to xtUML [1] or xUML [2], is the evolution of the Shlaer-Mellor method[3] to UML. Executable UML graphically specifies a system using a profile of the UML.
Would someone who does know what that means please insert a paragraph for lay people at the beginning of that wikipedia entry?
Try reading it "FAst Search & Transfer"... You see? You *do* have selective dyslexia! Hehe.
If you read the link you would see that the company was formally called "Fast Search & Transfer", and that it's a recursive acronym.
So, in Microsoft terms, I assume that "taking concrete steps" implies something about "wearing concrete shoes", no? So, basically, they're saying that they'll size up their customers for a new pair, right?
Cynically yours,
I've been runing FAST ESP 5 clusters on RHEL for since 2008, used for web and site search. I found FAST ESP 5.2 especially to be terribly buggy on large deployments, and some issues their support never did resolve.
Moving to a unit that just needed to search a db, we ran ESP 5.3 for a year, but have now switched completely to Apache Solr. For searching records from a database, Solr does everything we need without gouging the company for $$$$$$ in annual support fees.
In just a few weeks we were able to set up a Solr cluster, integrate it using SolrNet, and tune Solr to produce excellent relevant results with very flexible matching. Relevance is excellent because we could tune Solr's ranking algorithm - FAST ESP was always a black box. Over about a week we tuned the parameters, and Solr now delivers better results than FAST ESP did on our data.
Maybe they will open source it and give the lucene/solr stack a run for its money.
NOT!